


Whatever Happened to the Clown Prince of Crime

by DracoMaleficium



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Background Harley/Ivy - Freeform, Background Harley/Ivy/Selina (implied), Background Joker/Other Characters (mentioned), Bittersweet, Character Study, Coma, Dreams, M/M, Metafiction, Mirrors, Mystery, One-Sided Harley/Joker (mentioned), Relationship Study, Supernatural Elements, Visions, canon study, ticking clock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-27
Updated: 2018-06-27
Packaged: 2019-05-28 22:03:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 31,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15058754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DracoMaleficium/pseuds/DracoMaleficium
Summary: The Joker falls asleep one night and doesn't wake up.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [robatics (synthwave)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/synthwave/gifts).



> First of all, HAPPY BIRTHDAY ROBATICS, hope you have a great one <333
> 
> I probably wouldn't be able to complete this monster if not for Ufonaut - thank you so much for all the support and brainstorming!!
> 
> Now, please heed the tags, guys. This one is more of an exploration of canon than a proper fic, and it is tagged with "All media types" for a reason. I won't say anything more about this so I don't spoil it, but the story is littered with all sorts of cameos and references and meta nuggets, and I hope catching and recognizing them all might be a fun game despite all the angst in the main story. For that reason I won't post the full list of those references here, and will only do so in a while on my Tumblr. 
> 
> This fic does reference a bunch of my own headcanons about Joker and other Batman characters though, and especially Joker's relationships, and will have mentions and hints of Joker/other characters, including a brief exploration of how [Joker/That One Broken-hearted Henchman from Devil's Advocate](http://dracze.tumblr.com/post/169745083313/hey-dracze-i-saw-a-post-recently-referencing) might have played out, and also Lexjokes and Joker/Constantine (blame Mellie for that one). It actually takes place in the same universe as ["Exactly What it Seems"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14197023) and ["Clown at Midnight"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13711800) and will reference them, but you don't need to have read them to understand this story. This is just a heads-up for those of you who don't like the idea of J sleeping with anyone other than Bruce. 
> 
> Additionally, there's scenes here - especially with Harley, Billy and Constantine - that discuss scenarios I was going to write as fics but never got around to it. I might do it now that they've been contextualized and then they'll probably be connected with this main one in a series. 
> 
> Another warning is that this fic doesn't contain actual suicide, but it contains something that could be seen as such. Carry on at your own discretion. 
> 
> Right, I think that's it. Hope you enjoy it, and let me know what you think!

The Joker is in his bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed, and it’s by the calm acceptance of that fact that Bruce knows this is a dream.

He’s not surprised. He’s had it before. 

He lies where he is and waits, wondering — calmly, patiently — where this particular dream will take them. Sometimes, Joker will have a knife, and it will end in blood and pain that doesn’t feel like pain at all, and Bruce will wake up without a single gasp, his eyes perfectly dry, his heartbeat strong and steady. There is no fear, there. Just acceptance. 

He doesn’t have to wonder what it means anymore. 

Other times there will be no knives at all, but hands and lips that start off cold but warm up to the touch. Those dreams take longer to shake off, and not only for the guilt they stick to the corners of Bruce’s heart, keeping it congested for weeks afterwards. 

And sometimes, there would be... this. The two of them. And no words necessary, because there is comfort enough in simple knowing, an understanding not only shared but, for once, acknowledged.

Tonight seems to be one of those.

Joker is hunched over, long arms folded casually over his thighs. He’s wearing his Arkham jumpsuit, the orange looking faded and dull in the stingy touch of moonlight. His sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, exposing stretches of white that the night renders sickly, skin and darkness blended almost into one, corners and edges smudged together as in a coal sketch. Hair curls over his eyes, which stay fixed on Bruce, reflecting the same calm acceptance now settled in Bruce’s heart.

Slowly, Joker smiles. He moves his hand. 

It rests on the bed, a finger’s length away from Bruce’s but no closer. 

“I think,” he whispers, craning his head to look out the window. Moonlight touches his face, sketches it in a subdued glow, settles on the rise of his cheekbones and plunges the hollows of his features in deeper shadow. His eyes take on a glaze that suddenly makes him look distant, and growing further away even as he sits there, gazing out at the city he can’t actually see. 

“I think...” he repeats. “I think I’ll go.”

Foreboding stabs sudden and cold in Bruce’s chest. He opens his mouth. He tries to say, _Don’t_. It feels important, all at once, that he does. 

No sound comes out; the coldness has shot up to his throat and closed it up. He tries to move his hand over Joker’s, to keep him there, to let him know — 

He blinks. He’s in the room alone.

Joker is gone.

 

***

 

As usual, Bruce arrives on the GCPD roof the following night to find Gordon waiting for him, shoulders hunched, face lined with exhaustion.

And something else besides, Bruce thinks, studying him in the light of the enormous bat silhouette cradling the city under its wings. Something sharper. Something that spells trouble.

“Got a message from Arkham,” Jim mutters without preamble once he senses Bruce’s presence in the shadows. He moves around the heavy machinery to shut down the beam and plunge the skies over the city back into acrid, cloudy darkness. 

Bruce’s body, already alert, draws up just that bit tauter against the suit. “An escape?”

“Not that I know of,” Jim shrugs, “but apparently something went down. Arkham wants us both there. He didn’t say why.”

Bruce is already turning to leave. 

“He did say it’s about the Joker,” Jim adds, and Bruce’s body betrays him, pausing on the ledge. 

_I think… I think I’ll go._

Bruce shakes off the memory and the drop of fear it spills before it can flood him, and jumps while Jim grumbles about meeting him there.

It was a dream, and dreams mean nothing, he tells himself as he gets into the car and pulls out of the alley. 

Even as he does, something deep in his bones already knows it’s a lie.

 

***

 

Bruce is the first to make it to the Asylum gates and parks the car just outside. He waits there for Jim, head craned high, eyes tracing stone and sculpture up to the towers that, from this perspective, seem to tilt sideways, some of the tallest spires shrouded in thick Gotham mist. 

He tries not to compare it to the way Joker’s skin seemed to blend with the night itself in the dream. He fails. 

“Should raze that thing to the ground,” Jim whispers when he makes it out of the car to stand beside Bruce. He looks up too, and they stand there in silence for about a minute taking in the sharp, forbidding Gothic structure where it grazes up against the clouds bearing heavily down against it. Arkham looks about as welcoming as it always does, and Bruce can’t blame Jim for stalling.

“Ah, dammit,” Jim says after a moment. “Best get on with it. Shall we?”

Bruce nods, tight and stiff, and follows Jim through the gates and up the drive. 

Just as they do, the massive double doors swing open. Jeremiah Arkham greets them on the threshold, hunched and pale and diminished under dark, arching stone. 

“You’re here,” he remarks, his eyes flitting over Bruce and then away. “Good. This way, gentlemen.”

He turns and marches into the hungry bowels of the dark, murky kingdom that he rules on paper only. Jim and Bruce follow, both stiffening as they cross the threshold.

“What’s this about, doc?” Jim asks as Arkham leads them past the main lobby and into the innermost maze of the high security wing. “Has he escaped again?”

“Not… exactly.” Arkham’s voice is strained, and hesitant, and he keeps darting nervous glances around as though expecting danger to spring at him from every corner, every cell they pass. 

“Okay.” Jim shoots a look at Bruce that’s equal amounts puzzled and irritated. “That’s… good. So why did you —”

“You’ll see,” Arkham tells them. “We… aren’t really sure how to explain it.”

“Wait.” Bruce stops, just as Arkham takes a turn that leads away into one of the off-shooting corridors. “That’s not the way to Joker’s cell. You’re leading us to the —”

Arkham nods, his face etched in fatigue, and for a moment, all Bruce can do is stand there, stare at him and _remember._

_I think I’ll go._

“Come on,” the doctor says, and turns his back on them, and keeps walking. 

Jim brushes past Bruce, a silent question in his eyes. Bruce shakes his head. 

He follows them to the infirmary, and as he does, the dream trails after him, cold on his skin.

Arkham doesn’t offer any more explanations until they push into the harsh white glare of the medical wing. He nods at the passing nurses and doesn’t pause in the main communal hall, instead striding right past it and through the swinging double doors at the end of the corridor leading to the smaller single occupant rooms beyond. 

He pauses by the furthest one and turns to his guests, seizing them both up.

“Word of this must not leave the Asylum,” he warns. “Not until we’ve had the chance to consult this case thoroughly.”

“Cut the cloak and dagger, doc,” Jim mutters, bristling through his unease the way he usually does. “I don’t wanna spend any more time here than I absolutely have to, no offense.”

Arkham’s eyes narrow, but if he does take offense, he decides to let it drop. 

“Very well,” he says, and unlocks the door. Jim steps in after him, and then, so does Bruce, blinking furiously as his eyes adjust to the brightness he wasn’t prepared for. 

White. Everything inside is white — the floor, the walls, the ceiling, even the glare of the lamp above. The tight, windowless room is even smaller than the cells and starkly utilitarian. There’s just enough space for standard monitoring equipment, beeping softly in the sterile silence, a nightstand, and — Bruce can’t avoid looking at it any longer — one bed. 

The Joker lies in it with his eyes closed, the red line of his mouth for once shut and almost relaxed. They dressed him in a white hospital gown just a shade lighter than his skin. If not for the green splash of his hair fanning out over the pillow, he would have blended in with the room nearly perfectly. 

Bruce stands in the door looking at him, and suddenly finds it impossible to take a single step closer. For a moment, it looks like Joker is — 

But no. He’s breathing. The rise and fall in his chest hardly registers but it’s there, and Bruce latches onto it with intensity and relief which, a few years ago, would have scared him. 

He accepts them both now, quietly, and hides them away for later. It doesn’t scare him anymore. Hasn’t for a good long while. 

“We found him like this at approximately 4 am this morning,” Arkham says, coming to stand by the side of the bed. “A guard on patrol thought Joker had fallen asleep in his chair. He left him alone. Then later in the morning an orderly brought him breakfast, and the Joker didn’t respond.”

Jim hums. From his spot on the threshold Bruce can only see his back, but that’s enough to read the tension keeping his body rigid underneath the pretence. “So what’s wrong with him, then?”

“We don’t know,” Arkham confesses, and the tight set of his mouth, the hesitation in his voice, make it obvious the admission is not an easy one to make. “He’s completely unresponsive. Nothing worked, not even some of the more… drastic measures.” 

“You zapped him?” Jim translates, and shrugs when incriminating discomfort flashes across Arkham’s face. “I’m not judging,” he mutters. “Hell, maybe another round might be in order. Make sure he’s not faking.” 

_He’s not_ , Bruce wants to say, and doesn’t. He wouldn’t be able to begin to explain where the certainty comes from, but it’s there, as solid and real as the support of the floor under his feet.

Beside the bed, Arkham shakes his head. 

“We’ve tried everything,” he claims, looking down at Joker’s face. “But the thing is, there is nothing wrong with him. I mean medically,” he adds when Jim gives a pointed snort. “His vitals are stable. Nothing in his physiognomy changed that would explain this. For all we know, he’s just…”

“Asleep,” Bruce whispers. 

The two men fall silent. Bruce is only vaguely aware of it. He’s looking at Joker’s face. 

“He looks like he’s asleep,” he says, softly, and after a moment Arkham clears his throat.

“Yes, indeed,” he agrees. “That’s exactly what it looks like. Except —”

“Except he won’t wake up?” Jim finishes for him. 

“Correct, Commissioner.”

“Well.” Jim takes a moment, and then shrugs. “Seems to me that’s the exact opposite of a problem.”

Arkham’s face twists into a sour grimace. “I’d urge you to treat this seriously, Commissioner. One of my patients —”

“Is out of commission, which means he can’t cause any more trouble. Which is all he was ever good for, anyway. Do enlighten me, doc, how exactly is this a bad thing?”

“We don’t know what’s caused this. He was in perfect health just last night. It could be contagious.”

“What, sleeping? You think there’s some sort of coma virus going around?”

“We don’t know! We’ve run every test that we can and nothing’s been detected yet, but all the same —”

“The surveillance,” Bruce says, and they both turn to look at him again. “From his cell,” Bruce clarifies. “I want to see it.”

They watch him, and the beeping from the vital signs monitor drops loud and intrusive into the silence. 

Arkham sighs, and pushes the glasses up his nose. He nods. “Let’s go.”

 

***

 

“There,” Arkham points to the screens. “This is the last footage we have of him conscious.”

Bruce stares up at the screen, swallowing against the clutch around his throat. 

Joker is in his cell, sitting up in front of a dresser. They let him have a plastic mirror and he’s staring into it, leaning over, both his hands planted flat against stone of the wall on either side of it. 

He seems to be saying something, but the camera caught no sound, and his lips move too erratically to read. 

And then —

“We had a momentary blackout,” Arkham informs them, standing stiffly to the side as all of a sudden the screen floods with static. “No longer than a few seconds before the backup power generator went online. It happens from time to time, nothing irregular about that, that’s what the backup generator is for. ”

“How long exactly?” Bruce presses.

Arkham shoots him a glare. “Twelve seconds.”

Bruce looks up at the screen, and sure enough, twelve seconds later the feed goes back online. It shows Joker still in the chair, in front of the mirror. 

Except now he is slumped as though someone had knocked him out, spilling out of the chair, head lolling upside down over the backrest, limbs hanging loose and lifeless. His eyes are closed. He looks —

Bruce turns away. 

“You found him like this?”

“Yes,” Arkham confirms. “We searched the feeds. He hasn’t moved since then.”

“Rewind,” Bruce tells him, and Arkham does so without a word. 

Bruce watches intently, taking careful stock of the cell as well as Joker himself. He makes Arkham pause as he compares the state of the cell before and after the blackout, then asks for footage from nearby corridors. 

“The window for the blackout was only twelve seconds,” Arkham reminds him. “Do you honestly think someone could have snuck into his cell, rendered him unconscious by undetectable means, and then fled without getting caught?” 

“Something happened in those twelve seconds,” Bruce insists. “You said you ran every test. Any signs of trauma?”

“None.” Arkham sighs. “Nothing pointing to violence, no new injection marks, no new internal or external damage.”

“His blood?”

“Clean.” Arkham hesitates. “Clean for him. That is to say, we detected no chemicals that weren’t already there the last time you brought him in, aside from our own drugs.”

“I want a list of those drugs,” Bruce decides, “his checkup test results from the last couple of years, and all other medication you’ve given him over the years.”

“Are you insinuating —”

“Who had access to his cell?”

“I’ve already interrogated my staff, Batman,” Arkham announces haughtily, “and I’ll thank you not to throw accusations around. I’m trying to run a respectable institution, and all my employees have the patients’ best interest at heart. None of my staff would have —”

“Just give him the list, doc,” Jim interrupts from where he’s standing by the door, arms folded. “And get one for me, too.”

Arkham sneers at him. “I thought you weren’t interested in the case, Commissioner.”

“I’m not. But if someone did attack him, like it or not, we’ll need to investigate. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that your _respectable institution_ caught heat on patient abuse in the past. I wouldn’t make it any more difficult than it has to be if I were you.”

Arkham is fuming. Bruce barely pays them any attention. He’s staring up at the monitors. 

The timestamp for the blackout displays 3:33 am. 

Bruce came back from patrol around 2 last night — the night was a quiet one for Gotham’s standards. He went to bed shortly past 3. 

There’s that cold clutch around his throat again, and his fists curl, remembering the desperate helplessness of unbreachable distance when he tried to touch Joker but couldn’t. 

_I think I’ll go._

“The mirror,” he says, rewinding the recording again. “He hadn’t had it in a while.”

He thinks Jim and Arkham might have been arguing — he can’t be sure. They fall quiet now, and Arkham clears his throat. 

“He asked for it,” he explains, sounding defensive. “He hadn’t had any violent incidents for a whole month. In fact, he’d been remarkably calm and docile ever since you’d brought him in, barring one episode. We decided there wouldn’t be any harm in rewarding him for good behavior. It was a small request, considering.”

“Glad to see our taxpayer money is being put to good use,” Jim comments under his breath.

“What was the episode?” Bruce asks. 

“He and Edward Nygma had an argument in the rec room. It turned… violent.” Arkham straightens and lands an accusatory glare on Bruce. “Apparently it was about you, but they wouldn’t tell anyone any more details. Which surprised me, given that Edward is usually more than willing to tell on Joker, but I suppose the humiliation — ” 

“Did Joker ask for anything else?” Bruce demands.

Arkham takes a moment to think about it.

“Yoga tapes,” he says, “but that wasn’t a first. He’d shown interest in that before.”

“In _yoga_?” Jim sputters, incredulous. “That freak wanted to do _yoga_?”

“A perfectly reasonable method for managing violent impulses,” Arkham argues, the skin around his neck now blotched into an angry blush. “The Joker tends to have… fads. Sometimes it’s reality TV. Sometimes it’s novelty item collectibles. Sometimes it’s radio dramas from the 1940’s. He’d had a yoga fad before, so it wasn’t particularly at odds with his known behavioral patterns.”

“Do you have footage?” Jim asks, almost hopefully, and Arkham spears him with a glare.

“I will not make a spectacle of my patient for the GCPD’s entertainment.” 

“Anything else?” Bruce presses.

Another pause.

“No, I don’t believe so,” Arkham says at last. “Just the mirror, and to be allowed to use his one hour of television privilege to watch the yoga tapes in his cell. Crayons, too, I suppose, but that’s normal for him as well, he wants them every time he’s brought in. The Joker may be a troubled soul, but he’s nothing if not creative,” he adds, getting defensive again, as if daring either of them to argue. 

“Yeah, he’s a regular fucking Dali,” Jim grouses. “I’m sure that’s a great comfort to all the families whose loved ones he murdered. Long as he did it _artistically._ This city, I swear to god…”

“I want to see his cell,” Bruce decides. “I will need this footage, too.” 

Arkham opens his mouth, his face scrunched up in protest, but Bruce doesn’t give him the time. He’s swiping Arkham’s security badge and moving out of the booth before the doctor can get a word in. 

“Better do what he says, doc,” he hears Jim say over the outraged noises Arkham is making. “You want to get to the bottom of this? He’s your best bet.” 

Then he hears footsteps behind him, and doesn’t comment on the fact that despite his obvious reluctance, Jim still hasn’t left. 

The reassurance helps stave off some of the coldness, if not for long. It bites back with full force as he steps into Joker’s empty cell.

“I hate this place,” Jim murmurs, tailing Bruce after telling Arkham to wait for them outside. “Gives me the goddamn creeps.” 

Bruce nods. He’s trying to calm down the deep, primal twist of unease that tugs at him as he studies the cell, and under any other circumstances, he might have smirked at Jim’s wording. 

The creeps is certainly one way to put it.

“So, what are we looking for?” Jim asks. “You think someone attacked him, don’t you?”

“People don’t just drop into a coma for no reason,” Bruce whispers, mindful of Arkham standing just beyond the reinforced plexiglass. 

“The Joker might.” Jim shrugs. “Not like it’s never happened before. Remember when we _almost_ executed him,” Bruce pretends he doesn’t catch Jim’s sharp glare, “and he passed out in the electric chair?”

Bruce shakes his head. “That only happened whenever he was out and forgetting to eat and sleep, during periods of sustained emotional distress. And he’d never been out of it for this long before. His life at Atkham is structured. They’d note if he wasn’t eating or resting properly.”

“Well, who the hell knows what those chemicals did to him long-term. Maybe it’s finally catching up with him. Would serve him right, too,” Jim adds in a dark undertone.

“Maybe,” Bruce allows, unconvinced. “We won’t know until they run more tests. For now, I need to check what I can.” 

“The good doctor is right, you know,” Jim argues as Bruce starts moving around the cell. “The window is too small. If someone tried to get in and out of his cell in twelve seconds some of the cameras would have caught them, but you saw the footage. No one was anywhere near here at the time.”

“The footage could have been tampered with,” Bruce says. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

Jim falls silent after that, and lets Bruce work. 

It doesn’t take very long. 

Bruce checks the plastic mirror first and finds a surface smudged in finger-painted circles, but nothing but old cracked stone on the other side. The dresser holds what sparse make-up items Joker was allowed, and his crayons, which look like they’ve all seen a lot of use. The white one appears to have broken in half; both ends are blunted. 

Bruce is thorough in examining the photographs and newspaper clippings on the walls, and painstakingly records the nonsense scribbled all over the space that’s not occupied by Joker’s memorabilia. There seem to be a lot of circles this time around, which is new, but other than that nothing there looks like possible clues at first glance. 

He ignores the stutter in his heart when he sees Joker’s tattered, patched-up teddy bear, sat primly on the pillow as if to preside over the rest of the cell. He examines it briefly and then checks the cot, the coarse woollen blanket and the sheet, the flat pillow, then the empty, dusty space beneath where Joker’s Arkham issue slippers still rest, waiting for their owner to slip them on. He looks into the drawers of the dresser, only to find spare shirts, underwear and socks, and more make-up, more crayons, more photographs, more of the novelty collectibles Joker sometimes likes to hoard, some books, most of them fiction, a deck of playing cards; and sheet after sheet of paper scribbled over with doodles. 

Bruce photographs all of it with the camera built into the cowl, then collects the doodles, just in case. With Joker, you never know what’s chaos and what’s message.

More circles, he notes, leafing through the sheets. He frowns, then moves on to examine the sanitary fixtures.

“You let him keep a teddy bear?” Jim asks as they finally leave the cell and step aside to let Arkham lock it. 

“Ah. Yes.” Arkham smirks. “Bruce the teddy bear. The Joker has had it for quite a while and gets… distraught… whenever anyone tries to take it away. He claims it helps him sleep.”

“Freak,” Jim mutters.

“Please refrain from derogatory remarks about my patients, Commissioner.” 

Jim’s face freezes. For a moment, it looks like he will actually punch the doctor, and Arkham recoils, seemingly realizing what he’d just said, and who he’d just said it to. 

“Commissioner —”

“The tapes,” Bruce interrupts, stepping between them. “I need them. Not just from last night, but anything involving Joker since I brought him back. All of Joker’s personal effects, from the cell and the storage rooms. Anyone with access to his cell, any drug you’ve ever had him take. His visitors, if he had any. Anyone he’d been in contact with. Test results.”

“Anything else?” Arkham asks, biting, glaring between him and Jim like he’d like nothing better than to kick them out even though he was the one to call them in in the first place.

Bruce ignores the sarcasm. “If I need anything else, I’ll let you know.”

He sweeps past Arkham, and says, over his shoulder, “I’ll come back to collect later tonight, doctor.” 

He leaves before Arkham can protest any further, Jim trailing behind. 

“This case is all yours,” Jim says as they leave the gloom of Arkham behind and get to their respective cars. “The department’s stretched thin as it is. We don’t have time or manpower to waste investigating why a clown decided to take a nap. For all we know, he could just as well be faking it.”

Bruce knows better than to voice his objections. He nods instead. 

“It’s probably all biological, anyway. All that toxic sludge he fell into… And they keep finding weird stuff in his brain all the time, from what I understand.”

Bruce opens the car door and slips inside. 

“I can see you’re… eager. Knock yourself out,” Jim tells him, wincing. “Keep me updated if you do find anything. Not that I think you will.”

“Goodnight, Commissioner.”

“Yeah.” Jim’s hands slip into his pockets, and Bruce can see his fingers twitching, feeling around for a cigarette box that isn’t there. “Yeah, you too.”

Bruce lets the door fall shut and starts the engine. 

_What did you do_ , he thinks as he drives, catching the last of Arkham’s towers in the rear view mirror as distance swallows them up. _What is it this time. What are you planning._

He thinks about the dream again, and the distant, longing look in Joker’s eyes. 

_I think I’ll go._

Bruce’s hands squeeze tight on the feel, and his foot comes down. 

Whatever it is, he’ll find out. 

 

***

 

“Show me,” Bruce mouths soundlessly. He frowns. Is that it? Can he be sure?

He rewinds and watches the moment again, slowed down, zeroed in on the movement of Joker’s lips. 

_Show me_ seems the most likely, but then again, this is the Joker. Bruce looks down at his other guesses, scribbled one under the other in a torn notebook page. He shakes his head and underlines the last one. 

_Show me, show me, show me, show me_ , repeated over and over in front of a small plastic mirror while Joker’s hands brace against Arkham’s walls as if for reinforcement.

What does that mean? What was the mirror supposed to show him? 

Was he speaking to the mirror at all?

“I thought I’d find you down here.” Alfred edges into Bruce’s field of vision, bringing with him the hot, savoury smell of soup. “Back to our favorite pastime, I see.”

“Not now, Alfred.”

“Any particular reason you’ve paused on a close-up of the Joker’s mouth this time, sir?”

“I’m trying to read his lips,” Bruce explains. 

“An edifying pursuit, I’m sure.”

“I think I figured out what he was saying just before the blackout,” Bruce says, ignoring the sarcasm and showing Alfred the page, “but if you’re wondering if it’s brought me any closer to cracking the case, then no. It sounds like nonsense.”

“Which, given that it is the Joker, comes as a complete surprise.”

“Alfred.”

“What about the data you bullied out of poor doctor Arkham?” Alfred asks, more likely as a peace offering than out of any genuine curiosity. 

“Still going through it,” Bruce points to the clutter around him as proof, “but the tests they’ve run came back clean. All the bruises, scars, scratches on his body, all the drugs in his system… they’re all accounted for. His heart rate’s low, but in his case that only means that it’s slightly below the normal human average. Arkham was right in that there’s no signs of anything suspicious he could have taken or been injected with during the blackout or the day before it.”

“Ah. And so you thought you’d check at the source?” 

Bruce looks up at the paused footage, at Joker’s half-open mouth. His hand drifts from the notes — _Show me_ — and rests on Joker’s doodles, pages upon pages of circles crammed in between nonsense. 

“Wouldn’t be the first time he left me a message,” he says. “I’ve learned not to disregard anything when it comes to him.”

Or almost anything. The dream still teeters on the edge of his thoughts, never too far, but he isn’t ready to acknowledge the connection. 

Isn’t ready to concede the defeat that that would bring. 

He zooms out of the close-up and plays the recording again — the empty corridors, the cell, Joker in front of the mirror, _Show me show me show me_ , the blackout, Joker’s body hanging off the chair as though someone’s cut the cord connecting his soul to his body.

He shakes his head and pulls the files close. He goes through each test result again; cross-checks them with Joker’s older medical records; runs more tests on Arkham’s footage to ensure it’s authentic and unedited; watches more of the surveillance of Joker’s stay in Arkham. 

When he looks up again, Alfred’s gone, and his soup has gone cold. 

 

***

 

Aaron Cash doesn’t seem surprised to see Batman looming outside his window. 

“Hullo, Bats,” he says easily, opening the window for him and stepping aside. “Been wondering when you’d come calling.”

“I read the files,” Bruce tells him, dropping into his living room. He remains standing when Cash moves back to his easy chair and glass of port, the television muted so as not to disturb the wife sleeping in the adjoining bedroom. “I want your opinion on the staff who came into contact with Joker.”

“Hand-picked by me.” Cash picks up the glass with his left hand and drains it. “I screened them, Bats. None of them have any personal history with the clown. We made sure of that.”

“We both know you and Arkham have picked the wrong people before.”

Cash shrugs. “Yeah, maybe. What can I say? Arkham’s a shithole. We’re constantly understaffed. Someone comes in looking for work, we can’t afford to be too picky. Still, we’ve learned. We know what sort of people we can assign to the max ward. Wasn’t any of mine, Bats.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“The orderly who brought him his meals?” 

“Kid from Star City. Bit of an idealist, but I think we’ve cured him of that. Never spoke a word to the clown, far as I know. Not that Joker didn’t try to start shit with him, but he does that with everyone. The official policy is to let him run his trap as much as he likes and carry on with our jobs. It was tame stuff for him, anyway, like his heart wasn’t in it.” 

Bruce brings out his miniaturized tablet, enlarges it and shows Cash the screenshots. 

“What do you make of this?”

Cash examines the pictures with a frown, his forehead breaking into a web of frownlines. He shrugs again. “Guy likes to doodle?”

Bruce points to one of the images: Joker sitting cross-legged on the floor of his cell, head bowed, white crayon in one hand, moving across the palm of the other. 

“White crayon on white skin,” Bruce mutters. “Has he done that before?”

“Drawn on himself? Yeah. Usually uses different colors though.”

“He was drawing a circle.” Bruce takes the tablet away. “First on one hand, then the other. Then he sat there for half an hour pressing both hands to the floor, palms down, as you played him the yoga tapes.”

“Right.” Cash isn’t trying to conceal his irritation anymore, sitting back in the easy chair and frowning up at Bruce. “So? He’s a freak. He does freaky shit like this all the time.”

“You didn’t think that was at all remarkable?”

“It’s the Joker,” Cash murmurs, as though that accounts for everything. For them, Bruce supposes it does. “Maybe you should ask the doctors.” 

Bruce steps back. “You can’t think of anyone on staff without a possible connection to Joker?”

“Nah. I told you. We’ve learned our lesson. After Quinzel? Anyone coming into contact with the clown gets screened _extra_ thoroughly. If there was something fishy going on, we’d have noticed.”

Bruce turns back to the window. He doesn’t want to tell Cash what he thinks of that claim, but he has a feeling Cash knows. 

And at least Cash was being cooperative. Bruce has no delusions about his next stop granting him the same courtesy.

 

***

 

“Nygma,” he says, coming to a stop before the plexiglass of the cell. 

“Oh, hello there.” Nygma puts away the book of crossword puzzles and tucks his pencil behind his ear. He sits up straight, cross-legged on top of his cot. He looks somewhat the worse for wear — there’s remains of an ugly bruise still blotching his jaw where Joker hit him, and band-aids cover the tracks of Joker’s nails where they raked over the skin of Nygma’s face. 

“I’d say it was a surprise to see you,” Nygma is saying, “but I’d be insulting both of us if I’d pretended not to have expected you. Tell me, Batman: what’s a circus without a ringleader?”

“What did you and Joker fight about in the rec room?”

Nygma’s eyes narrow, the way they usually do when Bruce refuses to indulge him. It might not have been a wise move to antagonize him, but Bruce doesn’t care. Not tonight. 

“What’s the hurry?” Nygma stretches, and crooks his mouth into a half-smirk. “It’s not like the clown is going anywhere. You’ve got time for a little game or two. Indulge me. What’s a circus without a ringleader?”

“Nygma.”

“Chaos,” the man says, and his eyes take on a gleam. “Rabble. Directionless and unstructured. Someone has to be there to maintain order and keep the performance moving seamlessly, and to end it when it’s time. Without him, the performance derails, becomes nothing but noise. Until someone else steps in and takes control.”

“And you think that someone’s going to be you?”

“That remains to be seen.” Nygma shrugs, but the smirk twitches at the upturned corner. “It would be fitting though, wouldn’t it?”

 _No, it wouldn’t,_ Bruce wants to say, and is angry at himself for instinctually catching onto the layers of meaning in Nygma’s little speech. 

“You’re assuming Joker won’t wake up,” he says instead. “Why? What do you know?”

Now Nygma grins, just for a split second, in triumph. Bruce waits it out. They both know who is — or was — the ringleader, and what Nygma’s circus signified. Bruce doesn’t have time for this.

“Not much,” Nygma tells him, “but enough.”

“Why did you fight?”

“Maybe I got tired of his self-aggrandizement,” Nygma huffs, and Bruce has a hard time containing his smirk. He wonders if Nygma will ever realize the irony. “Honestly, the way he talks about you, it’s like he’s in some way _entitled_ to you just by virtue of being the first to fight you. He didn’t appreciate me telling him he was no more special than any of the rest of us. Not surprising, really. Someone with his ego wouldn’t be interested in the truth. He’s a very sad individual, really. Delusional. He was actually trying to convince me that you respect him, if you can believe it, and that he has proof. Preposterous.”

Bruce considers that. “What proof?”

Nygma sighs. He opens and closes his palm over the fabric of the jumpsuit on his knee.

Then, “I used to have a start, and an end, but I don’t anymore. What am I?”

 _Circles_ , Bruce thinks. But no. Once a circle is complete, it has neither an end nor a beginning. 

Except. 

To draw a circle, you have to start at one point, right? And the end comes when the line meets itself. 

_What sort of proof is a circle?_ , he wonders, and only by the tilt to Nygma’s mouth does he realize he muttered the words out loud.

“Not a circle, Batman,” Nygma tells him smugly, relaxing somewhat from his formal posture. “The ouroboros.”

Bruce’s eyes widen behind the cowl lenses. 

The ouroboros. A snake eating its own tail. Is that —

“What does a man do when he realizes he’s been running in circles?” Nygma asks him, leaning forward, that same triumphant gleam back in his eye. 

Bruce feels cold.

 _I think I’ll go_.

“He tries to escape,” Nygma says softly. “In any way he can.”

“You think Joker’s done something to _himself_?”

Nygma leans back against the wall, and picks up his crosswords book. “You tell me,” he mutters. There’s a bitter note to his voice when he says, “You’re the one who knows him better than anyone. Or so _he_ liked to claim.”

He bows his head, then, and picks up the pencil from behind his ear. He doesn’t look up again. Bruce leaves without acknowledging the slip with the past tense that they both know wasn’t a slip at all.

 

***

 

“Well, now that you mention it, he might have said something about circles and snakes,” says Dr. Brown, Joker’s latest therapist, as she rolls her pen, palm flat down, back and forth over the desk. She’s following the path of the pen with her eyes, rather than meet Bruce’s, and reclining back in her revolving chair. “It’s entirely possible.”

“You don’t remember?” Bruce presses.

The doctor doesn’t appear impressed with his tone, judging by the way her frown deepens. She still doesn’t raise her eyes. “He does ramble a lot,” she says, “when he’s not being contrary or recalcitrant. I’m sure I don’t need to tell _you_ how impossible it is to get anything worthwhile out of him.”

Bruce’s mouth tightens. “So you stopped trying.”

“We never stop trying to cure our patients,” the doctor says woodenly. “If we did, the Joker wouldn’t be having any sessions to begin with. Considering his negative anti-recovery attitude and the depth of his psychosis, I do believe we’re being far more patient with him than other institutions might have been.”

“But you don’t pay attention to what he tells you.”

“That’s because what he tells me is nonsense, Batman. Nonsense or outright lies. Forgive me if I don’t keep track of all of it.”

“He kept drawing circles on his own palms. Did you keep track of _that_?”

The doctor hesitates. Then her palm moves again, rolling the pen towards Bruce and then back. “He did appear more… morose, than usual,” she muses. “And maudlin. When he was in the mood to talk, which wasn’t often mind you, he would usually recount his past encounters with you.” Finally she looks up at Bruce, and her eyes are cold, narrowed in hostility. “He sounded fond. And then he moved on to tell me how much he’d enjoy cutting me up to see what sort of noises my insides would make. Make of that what you will.”

“You haven’t made any other observations?”

“The Joker is not my only patient, Batman. I prefer to devote my limited time and resources to the patients I _can_ treat. Patients that have shown signs of improvement, and who _want_ to improve. With the Joker, we mostly focus on containment these days. I’m sorry if that’s not to your liking.”

 _You’ve given up on him_ , Bruce translates. A part of him understands it. A part of him even agrees. 

The other part of him slams the door on his way out.

 

***

 

The brightness of the room still hurts his eyes as he walks in, and he takes a moment to adjust. 

It’s longer than his eyes actually need. 

Joker’s chest, when he approaches the bed, still moves. Up, and down. Inhale, exhale. It’s slow. Measured, and deep. 

All these years, and Bruce has seen him pass out — from malnutrition, exhaustion, stress or, more often than not, Bruce’s own punches. He had never actually seen Joker sleep. 

“There’s been no change,” the nurse tells him, quietly, standing by the door with his hands folded tightly at the front. “It’s almost 48 hours now with no reaction.”

Bruce stands by the bed, looking down at Joker’s face. Slowly, he moves to touch Joker’s hand, and then turns it palm up in his own. 

It’s blank. Just white skin and nothing else. 

“Did you wash him?” he asks the nurse, who — he sees that from the corner of his eye — jumps a little at being addressed.

“Oh! Um. Yes.” He clears his throat. “We cleaned him before putting him in the hospital robe.”

“Was there anything on his hands?”

“Yes, actually. How did you know?”

“What was it.”

“White crayon.” The nurse swallows. “We didn’t actually see it until we started washing him. It, uh… blended in.”

“Did you see what it was?”

“No. Sorry. I could ask the other nurses if they —”

“Thank you.” Bruce is still holding Joker’s hand in his own. His thumb moves, just an inch, over Joker’s, before he can stop himself. “I need you to fetch Dr. Arkham.”

“Right! Yes. Yes, of course, right away, Batman. Sir.” 

Bruce waits for the sound of the door closing. Once he does, he lowers his weight to sit on the edge of Joker’s bed. 

He studies Joker’s sleeping face. His slow, steady breath. And as he does, his thumb moves, glove over skin, across Joker’s. 

“What did you do?” he asks, quietly, but the man on the bed doesn’t stir. 

It’s all that Bruce allows himself before something like a tremor wrecks his body, as though a blast of cold air struck against the back of his neck. He drops Joker’s hand — carefully — and stands. 

He’s stalking out of the asylum before Jeremiah Arkham can find him, and just as he puts his foot on the threshold, something white and purple and green flickers just on the edge of his vision. 

He freezes, and looks around. 

There’s nothing there but solid stone, and the sleepy silence of the lobby beyond. 

Bruce waits, pulse slamming in his neck, but he doesn’t see anything else. 

Still, as he clears the main doors and heads for the car, he thinks he can hear the echoes of familiar laughter trailing away. 

 

***

 

That night, the Joker is in his bedroom again, standing over him and watching. 

“It’s killing you, isn’t it,” he whispers, just as Bruce blinks up at him and sees the threads of moonlight passing through Joker’s semi-transparent skin. “Not knowing.”

 _Joker_ , Bruce tries, but as like in the previous dream, his throat can form no sound. 

Joker smiles. As he does, he seems to solidify, gain substance — and Bruce realizes it’s not the Joker. Or at least, not how Bruce last saw him, still and silent in Arkham’s medical wing.

Instead, Joker looks _young_ , his face vibrant and expressive, his hair elegantly styled to wing out on both sides of his head, a sharp widow’s peak in the middle of his forehead. His old hairstyle, Bruce remembers, from when he was just starting out. From the days of pogo sticks and balloons and Jokermobiles, and mock utility belts, and throwing pies, and games that hardly ever drew blood.

He seems taller, too, like this, his shoulders broader with the padding in his jacket, his waist even slimmer. His eyes gleam, and there’s an almost melodious, jittery energy to his movements. When he leans over Bruce, Bruce wonders if his own face looks young to match his. 

“Eddie was right, you know,” he whispers into Bruce’s ear. Bruce tries, but he can’t feel any substance of Joker’s breath on his skin. “I escaped. And now? I could go anywhere.”

 _Joker,_ Bruce tries again. His arms feel like lead. He struggles, and manages to lift one all the same, though only just barely.

Joker’s smile turns soft as Bruce’s hand goes straight through him, and he shakes his head as if in pity. “No, darling,” he whispers. “Not this time. I’ll be off now, I think. Toodle-oo.”

He leans down and kisses Bruce’s forehead. The spot he touched feels cold, and then even the coldness fades away to nothing as though it’s never been. 

Bruce closes his eyes.

When he opens them again, the bedroom is cold, and he’s alone. 

 

***

 

He finds Buster down in the docks, loading up a van with crates with a bunch of other hired muscle straight from the GCPD’s most wanted. Smuggling, most likely. At the moment, Bruce couldn’t care less.

He lets them see him as he drops onto the roof of the van, and watches them scramble away in a panic, yelling “The Bat! It’s the Bat!”

Buster isn’t yelling. He glares up at Bruce and spits, and then turns and runs in a far more purposeful manner of one with years of experience, surprisingly fast for a man of his considerable bulk.

Not fast enough.

Bruce’s batarang tangles the line around his legs. Buster’s bulk hits the ground with a loud thud, and he swears, kicking in an attempt to break free. Bruce strolls over to him and kneels down, unhurried. 

He says, “You were with Joker during his last caper.”

“Fuck off, freak.”

Bruce smirks. He shifts and moves to put his boot in the middle of Buster’s back. Then he balances his weight on that leg. 

Buster grunts and redoubles his efforts, swearing. Bruce gives him some time to squirm, and then asks, “That caper was too easy. Transparent and barely imaginative at all. It was almost as if he wanted to get caught. Would you happen to know anything about that?”

“How am I supposed to know? I’m just the muscle! He never tells me anything!” Buster wrestles on the ground some more as Bruce’s weight bears down on his back. “Geroff me!” 

“You’ve worked with Joker for years.”

“You trying to make a point?”

“Was there anything different about him this time? Did he act in any way stranger than usual?”

“Why the fuck do you care?”

Bruce presses down. Buster howls. “Holy fucking shit, you freak, are you trying to break my back?”

“Did he act in any way different, Buster? Tell me and I’ll let you go.”

“Like fuck you will.” But some of the squirming is subsiding, and Buster cranes his neck, trying to look at Bruce over his shoulder. He appears to think for a moment, and Bruce is patient. He waits. 

“Maybe he did wanna get caught,” he admits after a moment, grudgingly. “I dunno. Some of the guys wondered about the job too. Like you said, it was… simple. Rob a bank, and that’s it? Just some costumes, some music and confetti. But the boss wanted it that way and we didn’t ask any questions. He always knows best. So we did it. He did seem a bit… out of it though. Talked to himself more than he usually does.” Buster takes another moment, face scrunched up in pain, and then he wheezes, “And he met for dinner with Billy Shiner.”

“Billy Shiner,” Bruce repeats thoughtfully. “His old henchman?”

“Yeah. One of _those_.” Buster spits on the pavement again, adding his saliva to the already rich and vibrant life flourishing in the pavement cracks. 

“Where is Billy now?” 

“Stacking shelves at Walmart down by Amusement Mile, far as I know. Says he’s gone straight.” Buster chuckles, an ugly, wheezy sound. “If you can call it that.” 

Bruce nods. He lifts his weight off Buster. 

And then proceeds to tie up the man’s hands behind his back, leaving his legs bound as well. 

“Hey! You were supposed to let me go!”

“I lied,” Bruce tells him, getting to his feet. “Have a good night.” 

He sends Buster’s coordinates to Jim as he gets back in the car. The thug’s outraged protests cut off entirely as Bruce closes the door and seals himself in. 

He’s got some employee files to hack into.

 

***

 

Billy “Shiner” Rand is still asleep when Bruce edges into his two-room rented apartment above the butcher’s shop on the East End. He’s snoring, alone in a rickety double bed, and the sound drowns in and out of the wall-shaking rumble of the monorail speeding every few minutes just outside his window and throwing sporadic lines of light to elongate and then shrink back over the bare wooden floor. 

Bruce waits, and then shakes him awake. He covers the man’s mouth with his hand before Billy can scream.

“Billy,” he says levelly, looming over the man. “It’s been a while.”

Billy’s eyes are wide, his pupils shrunk in panic. Bruce lets him stew in it for a bit before he says, “It’s all right. I’m not here to hurt you or to take you in. I just have a few questions. I will let go now. Nod if you won’t scream.”

After a moment, the man nods. Bruce removes his hand, and lets him sag against the pillows. 

“Good,” he says, and then starts, “It’s about —”

“The Joker, yeah, I figured.” Billy sighs, rubbing his face with his hands. They’re shaking, and the man’s numerous piercings clink softly against one another as he fights to control his body. “Jesus. I don’t know what you want from me. I haven’t worked for him in ages.”

“I know. You’ve been keeping your nose clean. So why,” Bruce leans in, and Billy draws away like he’s trying to disappear into the wooden headboard, “did he want to see you recently?”

“Aww, shit. Who squealed?”

“Talk, Billy. The sooner you tell me, the sooner I’ll leave.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.” Billy takes a couple of deep breaths, and then shoots Bruce a look that’s just on the edge of a glare. “What, he escape again?”

_Eddie was right, you know. I escaped. And now? I could go anywhere._

“No,” Bruce says, shaking the memory from the front of his mind. “But I’m investigating a case connected to him.” He considers the man, and hopes he read him correctly. He gambles, “I’m trying to help him.”

“Help him?” Billy’s body is starting to settle, bit by bit, and his face changes, fear flaking off and into concern. His hands still tremble though, and he twists them into the sheets. “He in trouble?”

“You could say that. I’m trying to determine if anyone… hurt him.” He lets that sink in, and internally breathes a sigh of relief when Billy’s gaze drops down to his hands.

Outside, the monorail passes, a metallic screech that sends the walls and floor into a shiver. Billy looks up and seems to trace its light until it disappears. It’s another moment before he speaks. 

“He invited me to the Iceberg Lounge,” he tells Bruce quietly, looking down at his hands again. “The invitation got here by post, all fancy and proper. No threats or anything, just… ‘Please come.’ I didn’t wanna go, at first.”

Bruce nods, remembering the last time he saw this man. Remembering the confession about a broken heart and broken legs that, back then, startled and unsettled him more than he wanted to admit. 

“You did, though,” he says, softly, and the way Billy nods looks defeated. 

“Yeah,” he admits quietly. “I did.” 

There’s layers of self-loathing, longing and old resentment in those three short words that Bruce wishes he wouldn’t understand quite so well. 

“And?” he prompts.

“He really did want to talk. Like… I thought he wouldn’t even remember me but he was all smiles and charm when he saw me, and he patted me on the back, and even got my name right, and acted as if we were good friends. As if we never…” Billy swallows. Pauses. Finishes, “As if he never kicked me out for daring to fall in love with him.”

There it is again — the old unease. Flaring up in a corner of Bruce’s heart, as hot as it is irrational. He dismisses it as irrelevant. “Why did he want to see you, after all those years?”

“I’m still not sure,” Billy whispers. “He _said_ he wanted to catch up. Asked about my life, what I’d been up to. So I told him. And he acted like he cared.”

“And then?” 

Billy swallows. “Then he asked me what made me fall in love with him.” 

There’s silence as Bruce parses the words, and Billy — his memories. “Did he,” Bruce mutters. 

“Yeah. At first I thought he was having me on, yeah? Or fishing for compliments. He used to do that a lot when I worked for him.” Billy sighs. “But he had this weird expression on his face, like he was really curious. Or, maybe like he needed me to tell him. So I did. I told him.”

“And how did he react?” 

“He sat there and stared at the table for a really long time. I don’t know how long. I asked if he needed anything else, and then he acted surprised that I was still there. He was like,” Billy waved his hand, imitating a dismissal gesture, “and that was it. So I left.”

Bruce thinks about this. Then he asks the question he really, really doesn’t want to ask, but knows he has to anyway: “Can you think of anyone else he might have invited as he did you? Anyone else he could have asked that question?”

Billy smirks. It looks bitter in the darkness. “Harley Quinn, obviously,” he says with considerable derision. “‘Sides her? Dunno. I bet there’s been others, but I don’t think any of them lasted very long. Women, he charms them when he thinks he can get something from them, like Quinn or, or that one parole officer he suckered into releasing him. Guys like me, we’re just walking dildos.” Billy rubs his forehead when he says that, and avoids Bruce’s eyes. His face appears darker, but the lights are off so it’s hard to tell if it’s from embarrassment or something else entirely. “Good for when he feels like sex and little more than that,” Billy continues in a voice only just above a whisper. “He’ll get in a mood, he’ll invite a guy to his bed for a bit, he’ll let us worship him and treat him like a god, and then he’ll kick us out when he gets bored. That’s all it’s ever been. I don’t know if any of the others got… clingy.” 

“Is that what happened between you?” Bruce asks, with some difficulty, ridiculous though it is. He’s _known_ about all that. He’s seen it with his own eyes. And he knows, just like Joker does, that it never meant anything. 

Still.

“Yeah.” Billy huffs. “I got clingy. That’s what he said. And man, turns out he he hates that. It’s all well and good when you worship _him_ , so long as you don’t expect anything in return. And I guess that’s where I jumped the gun.” Billy is starting to warm up, and Bruce wonders if he ever had the opportunity to tell this story to anyone before, or if it’s sat in him for years, locked up and stewing. “I started to think, well, he chose me, right? And he looked like he was having a good time with me. Shit, sometimes he even let me stay in his bed after we were done, and talked to me about stuff. And it was like… fuck, man, you start to hope. Which was goddamn stupid of me, I know that now, but I was young and he was so different and special and colorful and all the things I couldn’t ever be, and he _chose_ me, and like… Yeah, it was bad. It got so bad that I was ready to run out there and fight you and everyone else who hurt him, all by myself, and bring him your heads just to make him happy.” Billy sighs, and mutters, “Should’ve listened to what he told me from day one.”

“And what was that?” Bruce asks quietly. 

“That his heart was already taken.” Billy looks up at him then, looking exhausted and shaken and raw, and in that moment they both know he doesn’t need to add anything else. 

Bruce draws himself up and gazes down at the miserable, hunched figure Billy cuts, alone in an apartment that barely holds together. 

“Go to the Martha Wayne foundation,” he says. “They’ve got an employment program for ex cons. They’ll help you.”

“Right.”

“They will. That’s what they do. You don’t need to stay here.”

“What’s going on with Joker?” Billy asks instead, looking very much like he hates himself for even asking. “Is it bad?”

Bruce hesitates. “I don’t know. I’m trying to find out.”

“Okay.”

The monorail passes again, and Bruce turns to leave. 

Just before he does, he catches a glimpse of his own reflection in Billy’s window pane, suddenly stark in the monorail’s beam. 

He thinks he sees Joker smiling at him over his shoulder, but when he turns, there’s nothing there.

 

***

 

Oswald Cobblepot looks genuinely surprised — and vaguely guilty — when he sees Bruce crash in through his window. He certainly drops the papers he’d been holding all over the desk and gives out a startled yelp, and then glares at the glass now littering his Persian rug. 

“Whatever it is, I don’t know anything and I haven’t done anything wrong,” he snaps at Bruce, gathering up the papers into a neat stack. “Feel free to leave the way you came.”

Just as he says it two goons barge in with guns at the ready, and freeze at the sight of Batman standing in the middle of the gaudy office. Cobblepot waves them off impatiently. “I’ll handle it, boys,” he tells them. “Wait outside until I call you.”

Hesitantly, they do, closing the doors behind them. Cobblepot sighs and folds his hands over the papers, levelling a glare at Bruce. “Well?” he demands. “I assume you have a reason for harassing an innocent businessman in the middle of the night.”

Bruce smirks, and quietly enjoys the way Cobblepot tenses in his high chair. “An innocent businessman,” he parrots, stalking towards the desk, “who lets the Joker use his restaurant to have dinner dates with his ex henchmen.”

“I don’t know anything about —”

“He was here, Cobblepot. All I want to know is, why? And how long did he stay?”

“If you think I have any influence on what that maniac does, think again,” Cobblepot tells him with an air of wounded dignity. 

“It’s your restaurant. He wouldn’t invite Billy Shiner here if he didn’t have your blessing.”

“If you truly believe that, Batman, you’re not nearly as smart as everyone thinks you are.”

“I don’t have time for this.” Bruce brings his fist down squarely in the middle of Cobblepot’s papers, and the man jumps a little in his chair. “I know he stays here sometimes when he’s out of Arkham. Was this one of those times?”

“You have no proof!” Cobblepot’s face turns red with outrage and nerves. “Your accusations are baseless! If you think I’ll confess to harboring a mass murderer in _my_ establishment —”

“How about this.” Bruce leans over the desk so that his line of sight is on the same level as Cobblepot’s. “You tell me about the last time you saw the Joker and I’ll leave your name out of the little import-export operation you have going with Falcone’s mob when I bust it.”

“You have no —”

“Warehouse XIV D,” Bruce recites, holding his eyes. “That’s one of yours, isn’t it?”

Cobblepot opens his mouth, only to close it a moment later. He sits there staring at Bruce, weighing his options, and Bruce lets him. He stays right where he is, holding the Penguin’s darting little eyes. 

Then, finally, Cobblepot sighs and lowers the chair to floor level before he slides out of it. He shoots a hateful glare at Bruce. “Follow me.”

He leads Bruce away from the office and towards the back, then down the stairs to the basements beneath the lounge. Curious, frightened eyes track their progress, but Cobblepot dismisses any nervous questions with a flick of his wrist, and Bruce keeps staring ahead. 

Finally they stop by an unmarked door, one in a series of unmarked doors in a long, dark, narrow corridor. Cobblepot pushes it open and steps aside. 

“His room?” Bruce asks, moving in. 

Cobblepot grunts something that might be assent, or might just be resentment. He doesn’t move from his spot on the threshold. 

“The occupant of this room,” he snaps, “and I am not confirming their name, last stayed here for a week about 4 months ago before they moved on to rejoin their old friends and get themselves into a spot of trouble. Before that, they returned for one evening to entertain a guest in this room, and did not spend the night. That’s all I know.”

“What did he do while he was here?”

“ _They_ ,” Cobblepot enunciates, “kept to themselves, as they usually do when they choose to stay here. We have… an arrangement. They come here when, for whatever reason, they need privacy, including from the aforementioned friends, and I don’t interfere nor charge them for the lodgings. In return, the guest does not meddle in my affairs for a certain time, and makes sure I am not inconvenienced by members of a certain caste of unsavory characters for the duration.”

“Did he ever talk to you while he was here?”

Cobblepot sighs. He glances out, as if to make sure that they won’t be overheard — as if his very word wouldn’t ensure their privacy — and steps into the room, then closes the door, leaving the two of them in darkness before he switches on the single lamp hanging from the ceiling. 

“I trust this conversation is not being recorded,” he says. 

“No.”

“And you won’t use it against me?”

“Not this.” 

Cobblepot’s eyes narrow. “Why not this, I wonder, when in the past you were quick to put me behind bars over matters far more trivial than harboring a criminal?”

“Did he talk to you.”

“Once. In my office. To make a request.”

“What request?”

“A bizarre one.” Cobblepot glances suspiciously around the room, peeking into the shadows crowding in the corners. “He asked me to provide three jars of soil from three locations: Arkham Asylum, Ace Chemicals, and Wayne Manor.”

And just like that, everything in Bruce stills, only to come thundering up with his his blood a heartbeat later. He knows he didn’t visibly react, and with the cowl on his face Cobblepot couldn’t have seen the way his eyes widened before he could control them, but _something_ must have given away some of his reaction because Cobblepot shakes his head. 

“Yes, I know,” he murmurs. “I told you: bizarre. He asked me to use my connections to collect the soil and bring it here into his room, but before you ask, he didn’t deign to tell me what he needed it for.”

“Is there surveillance in this room?”

“Good heavens, no. He’d kill me if I tried to spy on him. And between the two of us, I’d just as soon not know what he gets up to in here.”

Bruce looks around, swallowing. He says, “I need to search the room.”

“By all means.” Cobblepot does a broad sweep to indicate that Bruce is welcome to rummage around as much as he likes, and moves back to the door. “I’ll be in my office. My people won’t bother you. Stay as long as you need, Caped Crusader, and not a moment longer. Goodnight.”

With that, he leaves, abandoning Bruce in the dark room with no windows.

Right. 

Bruce moves from corner to corner, taking careful stock of everything, recording it with the camera in the cowl the way he did in Joker’s cell at Arkham. And much like back at Arkham, there isn’t a whole lot to record. There’s a proper bed instead of a cot at least, and the dresser — more elegant, but still utilitarian — sports a real glass mirror, and that’s about it. Doors in the wall opposite the bed lead to an ensuite, and Bruce wonders if all the rooms in the corridor come equipped with a bathroom or if it’s a special courtesy to Joker so Cobblepot won’t ever have to run into him. 

Just like in his cell, Joker has decorated these walls and floor with nonsense and doodles, too. There’s the usual babble — _Smile, Ha-ha-ha, Can’t spell SLAUGHTER without LAUGHTER, You’re never fully dressed without a SMILE_. Bruce ignores that. 

There’s circles, too. Bruce touches those, and thinks, quietly, about snakes eating their own tails, and escaping. 

The room is about the same size as Joker’s cell, now that Bruce thinks about it. Maybe bigger, but with your back pressed up against the wall, sitting on the bed with the light out, it would be easy to pretend. 

He wonders if that’s why Joker comes here when he wants — or needs — to be alone, and then discards the thought when it gets too cold. 

He finds the jars on the floor beneath the dresser, and brings them up to the light. They’re each of them labeled in Joker’s careless scrawl. Bruce’s heart stutters when he reads WAYNE MANOR on one of them. 

The connection between Joker and Arkham is obvious, as is his connection to Ace Chemicals. But Wayne Manor —

He wonders if Joker intended for Bruce to find this, and as soon as he does, he knows it to be true. 

He’ll have to ask Alfred if there were any substitute gardeners or other help coming into the house four months ago that might have been planted by Cobblepot to obtain this. Not that it matters. A little soil is nothing to lose sleep over; it would be only too easy to smuggle it from the grounds around the Manor and for all the Penguin knows, it was little more than a whim on Joker’s part. What would Joker need the dirt for, now… That is the real question. 

After a moment, Bruce opens the jar labelled ARKHAM and dips his finger in. Judging by the smudges, there’s about one third of soil left inside. Bruce touches it — he isn’t exactly sure why.

The mirror flickers. He looks up into it.

Joker is looking back at him, but just like in the dream before, he doesn’t quite look like himself. Neither does he look the way he did in the dream, though. Instead, he looks old, his hair much sparser and combed back revealing a receded hairline, his face gone so gaunt it crosses into ghastly, and his clothes are stained, tattered and fraying. And his skin — 

Bruce opens his mouth. His throat is cold, and blocked, as though suddenly he’s back in the dream. His fist curls where it digs into the soil in the jar. 

The Joker in the mirror laughs, and the sound breaks off into a cough so pained and hoarse it shakes his entire frame. Bruce watches in horror as tears squeeze out of his eyes, and his skin _breaks_ , the angry, fleshy patches and boils staining it popping to ooze something that looks like blood down his face and neck. He coughs, and coughs, and coughs until his head hangs low and his body bends and spasms in pain as though any minute now it might crumble. 

“I don’t think I like it here, darling,” he wheezes, and his voice sounds like there’s a grate in his throat shredding the words on their way out. “Guess it’s time to go.”

He winks at Bruce, and as he does, flames explode behind him.

Bruce shouts, “No!” and jerks his hand out of the jar to put both his hands on the mirror. 

Joker disappears the moment he does, and Bruce is left alone with his own reflection, his mouth half-open and mocking him with the expression of utter helplessness.

From his right hand, when he opens his fist, specks of Arkham dirt crumble to the floor. 

 

***

 

He’s ready to head straight to Ace Chemicals next, but before he can, an explosion over in the East End sets the sky on fire. 

He’s on the scene before the police arrive, and he saves three people from the burning building before the fire fighters manage to start the hose. 

“Thank you,” a young girl says tearfully, her face streaked with soot, clutching onto his cape. 

Bruce nods at her, and then rushes back into the building to make sure he got everyone out. 

As he runs, he tries not to think about the flames behind Joker in the mirror, or the way his very skin seemed to burn as if something toxic inside him finally ate through him to the other side. 

He dreams about him that night all the same, Joker’s sick skin popping open, his lips little more than an open wound, his eyes bright with fever. Joker doesn’t talk to him, just coughs up blood until he falls, and in the dream, Bruce catches him and carries him somewhere while an old love song plays muted in the distance. 

The melody lingers in his ears when he wakes up, and over the cold sweat drenching his skin and the frantic beat of his heart, he thinks he can still smell smoke. 

 

***

 

The next night, he stops by Arkham first, and is swept up in relief to see that the real Joker’s skin remains clear and white and relatively unblemished, even if his eyes never open and his breath, if anything, seems shallower than before. 

This time, Bruce listens intently to the nurse explaining the new tests they’ve run — “Nothing conclusive yet, Batman, sir” — and the specialists they’ve invited to consult who are bound to arrive by the end of the week. They’ve scheduled a brain scan at Gotham General and have sent samples of Joker’s blood and tissue to laboratories in Metropolis and Star City, hoping that the scientists there might somehow discover something new about the influence of chemicals on Joker’s body that no one else has discovered before.

“So that’s your working theory?” Bruce asks. “That it’s his body?”

“Well. Yes.” The nurse shuffles his feet in place. “There’s not much else it could be.”

Bruce looks at Joker’s face. It looks peaceful, not a sign of ruin or blood anywhere in it, but Bruce remembers the dream. He wonders, for the first time, if Jim and the doctors might be right.

He takes Joker’s hand again after the nurse leaves, and traces a circle over the inside of his palm. 

He squeezes, once. He whispers, “Show me.”

But Joker doesn’t move, doesn’t even twitch, and when Bruce looks around, there’s only the white, white walls and medical equipment beeping quietly to tell the world that the man in the bed is still alive. 

Bruce lays Joker’s hand gently down over the covers, and leaves before he can drive his fist through the monitor. 

 

***

 

Ace Chemicals has been shut down for years, so it’s easy to slip in through the skylight without worrying about getting noticed. Bruce drops down on the grapple straight onto one of the catwalks stretching over massive chemical drums, and his footsteps thunder in the vast, dead space like in an empty church, if churches were made of metal. 

This place is close enough to qualify now, Bruce supposes, and if it’s not quite a church yet, it’s a shrine nonetheless. Why else would the city leave it standing long after the factory had been deemed an environmental hazard? 

To scare, and remind, and enshrine, the way you do with relics. 

Bruce isn’t even sure why he’s here. 

He walks through the gloom, checkered at regular intervals with faint patches of light from the skylights up above, until his feet guide him to that one spot that doesn’t look any different from the others, but that he could never miss. 

He looks down. 

_That’s not quite true_ , he thinks then, gazing into the vat with its deathly cocktail of toxins that changed so many lives in a single night. _You know exactly why you’re here. It’s because of circles, and snakes, and the fact that sometimes to go forward, you need to go back._

_Is this what you want me to do, Joker? Go back to the beginning? Is that what this is about?_

Below, the chemicals lie still, reflecting Bruce’s image back up at him. The city never did manage to figure out what to do with the gallons and gallons of toxic waste that the plant produced. They’re too dangerous to release into any body of water, and draining and processing them would be too costly. We’ll deal with it later, said official after official, because in Gotham, there would always be something far more urgent to take care of, and the voting public didn’t much care. 

Bruce stares into the gunk and waits. He doesn’t know what for. 

“Show me,” he whispers, eventually, and closes his eyes. 

When he opens them again, he is no longer alone on the catwalk. 

“Well, now,” says the man reflected next to him who is and isn’t the Joker, “this sure is… interesting.”

He has green hair, but it’s obviously dyed and blond at the roots, and falling long over his shoulders. He has far more bulk to him, and looks shorter, the color of his clothes faded and subdued, and the outfit doesn’t look tailored so much as cobbled together. His corsage is missing, and he’s hunching, as if to emphasize his _otherness_ even further. 

The face, though — that’s what strikes Bruce the most. 

His skin isn’t white. It’s _painted_ white. And the paint cracks and flakes off over the wrinkles on his forehead, and his eyes are rimmed in stains of too much black, and the sloppy smear of lipstick on his mouth covers not acid burns, but fleshy scars that look like they might have been cut with a razor. 

“It’s funny,” the man says, looking thoughtful, “this one doesn’t hurt. The paint keeps getting in my mouth though. And there are no gargoyles here.”

Bruce is afraid to look to the side to check if the man really is standing next to him, or even to blink. He doesn’t want to lose the image in front of him.

“Joker,” he tries, and it’s the first time that he manages to make any sound during one of those moments that sometimes are dreams and sometimes… almost. 

The man who is and isn’t Joker stares at him, his eyes wide. 

“Where are you,” Bruce tries. 

Joker opens his mouth, but only laughter comes out. 

Bruce blinks. His reflection is, once again, alone.

Which means that no one will see if he collapses on the catwalk and sits there with his eyes closed, just for a bit. Just for a few moments. Just to breathe. 

He is out of leads.

 

***

 

That morning, when Bruce finally allows himself a moment to nap, Joker looks young once more, and tall and thin and white-skinned without paint, but his silhouette is still more substantial and — well, more normal. For one thing, his waist isn’t thinner than Bruce’s arm anymore. His thick hair is significantly darker, too, and slicked back, and he’s wearing a white Arkham uniform with a purple shirt underneath.

“This one’s okay,” he tells Bruce, smiling brightly as he bounces on the bed, feet plunging into and through Bruce’s sheets without making a single dent. “Think I’m gonna stay here a while, see where it goes. Maybe I’ll get you to hug me back.” He stops, then, and tilts his head to the side, examining Bruce. “You’re asleep, aren’t you, buddy? You’re dreaming. You can’t actually see me when you’re awake. Can you?”

 _I can_ , Bruce tries to tell him. _I do._

His mouth goes so far as to form the words, but as before, no sound comes out. Joker’s eyebrows ride up. He doesn’t smile.

He disappears in the very next heartbeat, and once again, Bruce wakes up alone.


	2. Chapter 2

Bruce doesn’t dream of Joker, or see his specter in any other forms, for a full two weeks after that — so long that he starts to quietly agree with Alfred that he is working and worrying too much. It may be that his brain is desperate to make _some_ sort of connections, anything to help Bruce move along with the case, and it’s using dreams and exhaustion to convince him to latch onto something vague and insubstantial for lack of anything better. He isn’t sure that it would explain the _visions_ , but it’s a better explanation than most, and the only one he’s ready to accept right now. 

So he tries to slow down. He tries to sleep more, and not dwell on what he’s seen. He doesn’t visit Joker in Arkham for fear that the sheer clutch of _helplessness_ gets too much, and only checks in at the Asylum for updates. 

What little there is of them, anyway.

“And what is this?” Alfred asks as he comes down, his feet all but soundless on the steps down into the cave. 

“Joker’s brain scan,” Bruce mutters. 

“Oh.” Alfred is silent until he stops by Bruce’s chair, and they both look up at the scan on the big screen, its colors and swirling patterns. “That is… curious.”

“Stage three of non-REM sleep,” Bruce agrees. “That’s what it looks like. We cross-checked it with his older scans to make sure. That’s his regular brain activity when he’s conscious.”

He enlarges another image and displays them both side by side to compare. Next to him, he hears Alfred draw a sudden breath. “Good lord.”

“Yeah.” Bruce pinches the bridge of his nose. 

“That… Does go some ways towards explaining him, I suppose.”

“But it does not explain why he’s been asleep for almost three weeks.” 

“Did the lab samples return anything useful?” 

“They’re still working on them. In fact, they asked for more samples. Which by and large means they’re as clueless as we are.” 

“Well.” The following spell of silence is heavy, and layered. Bruce is too tired to try and untangle it. “I suppose, if his state remains stable…” Alfred tries. 

“I need to know what happened to him, Alfred.”

“I know you do. But it doesn’t seem like he’s getting worse and you do have other cases on the table, Master Bruce. Besides, I’ve come to tell you that it is almost six in the morning.”

Bruce sits back and looks at Alfred. “Oh.”

Alfred smiles, and the expression is far too gentle. Far too knowing. Bruce looks away. 

“You need to sleep, Master Bruce. Come on, up you get.” 

So Bruce slopes off after him, reluctantly, and that morning, he dreams again. This time, when Joker comes to him he doesn’t look young so much as ageless, and his hair is much more voluminous, his face much smoother and rounder. He’s missing his suit jacket, and the short-sleeved shirt underneath shows off bare white arms where Bruce sees tattoos he doesn’t remember Joker ever having — playing card suits.

“Nice, aren’t they?” Joker enthuses, swinging his legs back and forth as he sits on Bruce’s bed. “I might consider getting them for real. And look.” He grins, and moonlight glints off teeth that appear inhumanly pointy. “This, I’m not too sold on yet, but I’m sure they have their uses. Just imagine what I could do with them back home. Probably for the best that this one is PG, all things considered.” He giggles, and then his face softens as he studies Bruce’s face.

“You know what the best part is?” he asks, quietly, leaning over. 

_What_ , Bruce mouths. 

Joker lays his body down on the bed alongside Bruce’s. He doesn’t move close enough to touch, and Bruce suddenly can’t move a single limb to draw him in.

Before he disappears, Joker whispers, “I’m getting used to holding your hand.”

 

***

 

The next night, Bruce starts going through Joker’s hideouts — each and every one he knows. They’re all empty, stacked full with old customized decorations, clown paintings, ornate J letters, jack-in-the-boxes, papier mache Joker heads, newspaper clippings. All untouched but for the dust, which swirls in the beam of Bruce’s flashlight as he moves across the floor.

He’s decided that he needs to focus on what Joker had been up to in the months before Bruce last caught him.The last two weeks are now accounted for, thanks to Cobblepot and Buster, but there was a period of two months between that and Joker’s last escape when he’d been unusually quiet. People even talked that he might have left town. 

So far, the hideouts haven’t given Bruce any reason to confirm or discard that as a possibility, but that’s no reason to stop searching. 

It’s when he’s sweeping the basement under the old _Ha-hacienda_ in the suburbs that he hears the news for the first time. 

“What is it, Commissioner?” he speaks into the burner phone. 

Jim’s voice sounds strained, but then again, it always does. It’s not why Bruce’s blood suddenly runs cold. 

It’s the pause. The moment of hesitation when Jim is obviously trying to pick the right words. 

“It’s the clown,” he says at last. “There’s… news.”

“What is it.”

“They’ve been trying to reach you. It would appear that he’s… getting worse.” 

Bruce stares at a picture of Joker, his mouth open in laughter, frozen in the giant framed photograph. “How,” he manages.

“His vitals started to drop. His heart stopped. Apparently it happened overnight. They say it’s gradual and that they stabilized him for now, but also that they think it will happen again and that they don’t know how to stop it.” 

Bruce closes his eyes. It’s a while before he opens them again. 

“Batman?”

Bruce ends the call and stuffs the phone into his belt. Then he all but runs up the stairs and into the car, ignoring the way the eyes in the photograph seem to blink and follow him out.

It feels like he only stops running when he bursts into Joker’s too-white room, and sits on the edge of the bed, and takes Joker's hand in his, for once not caring if there’s anyone else in the room. The nurse stutters through an explanation but Bruce only seems to register half the words.

Joker’s pulse is weak under his fingers, but it’s there. There’s shadows under his eyes, and his skin is beginning to take on a shade that’s looking grayish rather than white. A mask of the assisted breathing apparatus covers half his face. 

_Please_ , Bruce repeats in his head, thumb pressing into the jutting vein in the middle of Joker’s wrist. _Please._

“Batman?” the nurse tries, after Bruce doesn’t know how long. 

Bruce stands. “Send word as soon as there’s any change,” he tells the nurse. 

“Of course. Do you need to talk to —”

“No,” Bruce says, and leaves.

 

***

 

Clark hovers over his car just beyond the Arkham gate, looking odd and out of place. Bruce stops short when he sees him.

“What are you doing here?” 

“I’ve heard what’s happened to Joker,” Clark explains, landing neatly on the path in front of Bruce. ”You’re investigating?”

“Yes. I’m in a hurry.”

“That’s why I’m here.” 

Bruce turns to look at him, Arkham’s shadows looming across both of them. 

“Talk,” he says. 

“I know he was in Metropolis,” Clark says, looking uncomfortable but resolved. “He visited with Luthor for a night.”

Bruce’s face is pulling tight. “When was that?”

“Before the bank robbery when you caught him.” 

“And you knew about this how long?”

“I didn’t think it was relevant,” Clark tells him defensively. “He didn’t do anything. Just went in and out. He does that sometimes. I didn’t think it was important until I heard them talking about Joker’s blood over at Lexcorp.”

Bruce’s hands want to ball into fists. He stops them before Clark can notice. 

“Well?” Clark smiles, hesitantly. “You’re going to Metropolis now, aren’t you? I can take you.”

“I’ve got a plane.” Bruce stalks past him and into the car. 

“Right,” he hears Clark say. “If there's anything I can do...” 

Bruce ignores him, and puts his foot down as he leads the car out onto the road back to Gotham. He’s already telling Alfred to prepare the plane as he does.

It seems that whatever time he had to spare has just run out. 

 

***

 

Luthor is in bed, and Bruce cannot deny the twinge of bitter satisfaction when he drives a batarang into the expensive-looking laptop resting on the nightstand. The noise jerks Luthor awake, and he lunges up with a decidedly impolitic curse on his lips. 

“Luthor,” Bruce says, and doesn’t give the man time to regroup before he moves in and crowds him against the plush headboard.

“Ah.” Luthor catches his breath, and Bruce watches as his usual superior demeanor gradually asserts itself, smoothening the surprise into something far more composed and elegant. Luthor relaxes, or at least wants Bruce to believe that he does, and in an irritated voice, he guesses, “I’m assuming you’ve made sure we won’t be interrupted?”

“Your bodyguards are taking a break,” Bruce tells him, “as is your assistant. It’s just you and me.”

“How cosy.” Luthor quirks an unimpressed eyebrow at him. “But I hope you realize that unlike your clownish playmate, it takes more than that to impress me.”

“Joker came to visit you,” Bruce accuses. “Why?”

Luthor smirks. “Really? You still need to ask, after the last time you invaded my bedroom?”

Bruce resists the urge to grab him by that smug throat and _squeeze_. “Was that all he wanted from you?”

“Back off and let me make myself decent, and I’ll tell you.” 

“No tricks.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” The smile Luthor gives him is pure oil. “I’m a respectable public figure now, or haven’t you heard?”

Bruce bears down on him, just to see a fraction of that smugness drip away, and then draws back to his full height. “Make it quick.”

Surprisingly, Luthor does. Bruce keeps track of him as he slips out of bed — naked — and collects a dressing gown from the bathroom, then moves to the liquor cabinet to pour himself a drink. He doesn’t offer Bruce any, which is just as well. If he had, Bruce might have smashed the glass over his shiny bald head. 

He nods at Bruce, then, all insouciance and composure, and tells Bruce, “Follow me.”

“I’ve heard about the Joker being… indisposed,” he confesses as he leads the way out of the vast, sparsely decorated bedroom into an even vaster, sparser office beyond. “This is why you’re here, isn’t it? I can’t think of anything else I might have done recently to earn your special attention.”

“Get to the point.”

“I’m sure you’ve studied his blood extensively,” Luthor carries on, ignoring him. He’s moving to his desk now, and opening a drawer to press a button inside. 

Next to Bruce, a portrait of Luthor himself swings to the side, revealing the smooth, metallic surface of a safe. 

“Makes for rather fascinating reading, doesn’t it?” Luthor says, smirking again. He sets his glass of whisky down on the desk and approaches the safe. 

At his proximity, a touchpad slides out to take his fingerprints, followed by a retina scan. A level, female voice asks, “Please provide a voice sample.”

“Of course, I’ve studied it as well, long before the incompetents at Arkham sent the samples to my labs begging for help,” Luthor tells Bruce as the voice recognition beeps green and then displays a coding screen that’s, supposedly, yet another security measure. “Much like you, I like to be prepared.” Luthor types in the required security codes with an air of boredom, barely looking at the keyboard. “And it’s had some rather... interesting uses. Tell me, have you discovered the _other_ most effective way to make the Joker shut up? Besides stuffing his face full of something to suck on, that is.”

Bruce glares at him from the side as the safe finally opens and Luthor, seemingly careless of Batman’s presence looming next to him, reaches inside to retrieve a vial full of clear, translucent liquid that looks just a little greenish in the far too bright glow of Metropolis by night. Luthor dangles the vial in front of Bruce’s face, his smirk once again perfectly poised and self-satisfied. 

“This,” he announces, “is why he was here.”

“Not the pleasure of your company?” Bruce mutters drily. Luthor shrugs and retreats with the vial to sit at his desk, setting it down next to his whisky. 

“Not recently, so I’d be much obliged if you would kindly put away the jealous husband act. Now. Please, sit.”

Bruce remains standing. Luthor sighs and steeples his fingers together, looking at Bruce over them like one might regard a stubborn teenager who refuses to clean his room. 

“Well, it’s your back.” He shrugs. “I’m sure the discomfort is worth whatever grand statement you’re making.”

“The vial, Luthor,” Bruce growls. “Stop wasting my time.”

“Quite.” Luthor smiles again, briefly, and then his face is all business as he turns to the computer screen on his desk and activates it. “Because I do hear you don’t have a whole lot of it, isn’t that right? Well, I’m not sure I can help, as I have already investigated this particular angle. Even so… You are aware, I’m sure, of the challenges Joker’s unique physiognomy poses to the effectiveness of common tranquilizing drugs?”

“They don’t work on him,” Bruce supplies impatiently. “So?”

“ _So_ ,” Luthor parrots, “the solution has most commonly been to simply shoot him with doses fit for a rhino. Crude, but it gets the job done and apparently that’s all the hacks at Arkham care about. On top of that, Joker suffers from acute insomnia, and given the way his brain processes external stimuli — or would it be more accurate to say, the way it doesn’t? — the lack of sleep certainly doesn’t help with his overall… how he is.” Luthor’s eyes narrow. “But of course I don’t have to tell _you_ that.”

“If you have a point…”

“Oh, I do. And as is usually the case, the point is that I’m a genius. Here, take a look.” Luthor shifts the monitor to point it at Bruce, and reluctantly, Bruce comes closer. “This is the composition of the drug I devised for him based on the samples he provided — quite consensually, I might add — some time ago.”

Bruce studies the formula, and slowly, begins to understand. “You —”

“Created a custom drug to help Joker sleep,” Luthor tells him. “Not just to knock him out like a rabid animal — which, incidentally, is exactly what he is — but to let him sleep properly, the way he isn’t able to on his own with all that stimuli constantly bombing his brain. It’s rather elegant, if I do say so myself, although I’m sure a man of learning such as yourself could have come up with something similar. You’ve devised antidotes for his Laughing Gas, after all, and all the other… interesting toxins you Gothamites seem to like so much. I’m sure this simply wasn’t a priority.”

Luthor lets that dangle between them for a heartbeat, and reaches out to take a generous sip of his whisky. 

“Why would _you_ do that?” Bruce demands. 

“Like I said, to shut him up.” Luthor sets the glass to the side, as though to illustrate that he is not attempting to use it as a shield. “You already know that he visits sometimes when he’s feeling low, or agitated, or rejected, or any number of negative emotions that push him away from Gotham. Well, sometimes he gets so worked up that simple physical exertion,” the corners of Luthor’s smirk tug up, “is not enough. He can turn into a proper nightmare. It was in my best interest to come up with something to grant him _some_ peace of mind, enough so that I could sleep or work without him constantly nattering on or threatening to go out and blow up my city if I don’t give him attention.” Luthor swirls the whisky in his glass. “Oh,” he adds as an afterthought, “and he asked me to.”

Bruce’s voice is tight when he growls, “I find that hard to believe.”

“Believe what you like, but I never drugged him against his will. Only when he asked me to. And the last time he was here, he wanted to take a vial of the drug with him, presumably because the old supply I gave him ran out.”

Bruce is silent, and Luthor studies him with amusement and interest in equal amounts. 

“Really, Batman,” he says softly. “Is it really that hard to believe that even the Joker would sometimes like to sleep through the whole eight hours, to let himself shut down without all the side-effects of the Arkham doses?” 

“You’re telling me your drug doesn’t have side effects?” 

“I told you, I’ve already studied that angle,” Luthor tells him, switching out of the formula in the screen to bring up analytics that Bruce recognizes as relating to Joker’s blood. “It was my first lead when they sent the samples. But I don’t see how my drug might have contributed to his current coma. It wasn’t even detected in his system when they did the rudimentary admission check-up. If he took it, it must have been at least a week before you brought him in, and any effects would have worn off by then.”

“Could he have taken it in his cell?” 

“I don’t see how. I know he’s crafty, and he might even have found a way to smuggle it into Arkham, but you must have seen his blood test results. If he’d taken it, the tests would have reflected that. Here. That’s what his blood looks like after he’s taken the drug, and here’s the Arkham test results. See for yourself.” 

Luthor is right. The tests would have shown it. But Bruce isn’t willing to let that lead go quite yet. “How long has he been taking that drug?”

“A few years,” Luthor admits. “Very sporadically, mind you — we’re talking once or twice a year, if that. And I know what you’re thinking. Might it have reacted negatively with the Ace slush already in his body to speed up the corrosion and trigger the self-destruct button? I considered it, and haven’t quite ruled it out yet.” He taps the screen with a stylus. “But the Joker has been on borrowed time ever since he fell in that vat. You know this. By all accounts, he should be dead. But he survived with the toxins in his body for years, his body keeping itself together only just barely, and well… it was bound to come back to bite him at some point.” 

“If your drug sped it up…”

“I haven’t ruled it out, but that doesn’t mean I consider it a likely possibility.” Luthor draws back in the chair, all smiles slipping. “Remember, I have the old samples from when we tested it. I took them out to check on their state. The drug hasn’t had any negative effects on the cells after all this time, and remember, Joker’s results do not point to any sort of disease or chemical poisoning.”

“Something in him is giving up,” Bruce states. “He was stable before, but he’s started to deteriorate.”

“Indeed, and we’re pursuing leads, but there is only so much we can do without direct access to his body to trace the changes in real time. And like I said, I doubt that it has anything to do with my benevolent attempts to help him get some rest.”

“Keep studying that,” Bruce tells him, “and contact me if you have any news at all.” 

“And how would I do that? Shall I install my very own bat-signal on the roof? Or do you have a business card?”

Bruce takes a spare communicator out of his belt, limits the frequency to allow only private communication directly to him, and tosses it at Luthor. As he does, he swipes the vial off Luthor’s desk. 

“I’ll be taking that,” he says. “Keep in touch. Make it a priority.”

“I hardly think —”

“And Luthor?” Bruce turns away from him to face the door to the office. “If he doesn’t make it, and I find out it’s your fault? I’ll kill you.”

Luthor is smart enough not to offer any more quips to that, or to claim that Bruce is bluffing. Bruce is grateful.

He isn’t all that sure that he is. 

 

***

 

When Bruce returns, it’s to the news that they have moved Joker, in secret, to a private room at Gotham General. He’ll have better care there, the doctors explain, and police officers will guard him in shifts twenty four hours a day. The hospital is far better equipped to handle such cases and keep Joker stable, and to intervene if his condition worsens again. They are also able to perform brain scans on premises.

Out loud, Bruce agrees that it’s something the Asylum should have done as soon as they realized that Joker wasn’t waking up. What he doesn’t voice is the private nag of unease at the thought of Joker being removed from Arkham. 

He doesn’t know why it feels important that the connection is maintained. But it does, and over the years, Bruce has learned to trust his intuition. So, before he retires for the night, he pays another visit to Cobblepot and harasses him to surrender the three jars of soil. 

Bruce then puts them under Joker’s bed at the hospital, feeling somewhat ridiculous as he does. He stops short of actually sprinkling the dirt on the floor. The hospital’s tolerance for his eccentricity will only extend so far, and he’s unable to rationalize the impulse even to himself. It just _feels_ like the right thing to do, like somehow the soil can tether something in Joker more surely than the straps keeping his lifeless limbs bound to the bed ever could. 

This will just have to be enough, Bruce thinks, looking at Joker’s face, once again half-covered with the assisted breathing mask. It might just be Bruce’s imagination, but his features look even gaunter than they did back at Arkham, the shade of his skin more sickly. Or it could just be the light. 

Instinct tells Bruce that it’s not, and prompts him to remove the gauntlet off his right hand. When he touches Joker’s forehead, it’s cold. 

Bruce presses down, then, against that cold white skin, just for a single heartbeat, hoping for he doesn’t even know what. Maybe for nothing. Maybe it’s for his own strength more than it is an attempt to bring Joker back. Maybe he needs to steal this much, because he may not be able to feel Joker’s skin against his own again. 

In any case, it’s futile. Joker doesn’t stir, and, the stolen second come and gone, Bruce snatches his hand away. He doesn’t indulge in one last look over his shoulder as he leaves the dark, quiet room.

He’s wasted enough time.

He tells the lab personnel to test Joker’s blood again, this time looking for traces of Luthor’s drug, and leaves them a sample for reference. Then he drives, fast as he can, back home, and kickstarts the analysis on his own computer, trusting its capabilities and speed far more than he does the equipment at Gotham General. 

And then, when the first attempt fails to reveal a connection, he runs the analysis again.

 _It’s got to be it_ , Bruce repeats in his mind, watching the data flitting across the screen. There must be _some_ connection, some sort of thread there, something to give him that one lead that will help him come up with a way to stop Joker’s body from burning itself inside out. 

But much like the first analysis, the second one doesn’t bring any new results. Neither does the third one. Bruce stares at the screen until the numbers blur and dance in front of his eyes, until all he can think of is how none of this makes any goddamn _sense_ , and _I think I’ll go_ , and, absurdly, betrayal.

 

***

 

This time, Joker is wearing a white suit jacket over a lilac shirt, heavily padded because his shoulders look far too broad. His hair is trimmed short but still curls, and his face looks different again — in place of the pointy triangle Bruce knows is a hard, almost square jaw. 

He also has batarangs sticking out of his right eye and both shoulders. 

“You know the funny thing about tunnels of love,” he muses, sitting on the edge of Bruce’s workspace by the computer that, behind him, has gone dark, “is that when you stab someone in the water, all the red and pink lights make the blood look practically black. When the colors should match. I think that’s hilarious.”

 _What happened,_ Bruce tries to ask from the chair, _Where are you. Help me find you._

Joker shakes his head, his smile softening into something sad. 

“Little death,” he says, airily, his eyes gleaming. “I always thought that was rather apt. After all, for men like us, pleasure, pain, it’s all the same. We peak either way, don’t we? I know you do, too. Even if you refuse to follow through on either one.”

Bruce holds his eyes. Then, swallowing, he nods. 

Joker’s smile settles. He reaches out and caresses Bruce’s cheek with the back of his hand, and Bruce wakes with a start when the chill goes right through him.

 

***

 

“Sir, you need to pace yourself,” Alfred insists when Bruce gets dressed before dusk can settle properly over the city. 

“I can’t,” Bruce says. “We’re running out of time.”

“All the signs seem to point to it being biological,” Alfred reasons, quietly. “Maybe…” he hesitates, but then decides to say his piece. “Maybe nature is simply taking her course. Maybe it’s not something you can fight. I know you don’t want to hear it, Bruce, but sometimes… sometimes there isn’t anything you can do.”

Bruce clasps the cowl over his face, turning his back on Alfred as he heads for the car. His footsteps pound in aggressive echoes across the cave. “I refuse to let him die.”

“Yes,” Alfred whispers. “I know. But you might need to prepare yourself for —”

“No.” Bruce gets in the car and shuts the door. 

Alfred’s sad, helpless expression sees him out in the rear view mirror, and as Bruce steers the car through the tunnel and onto the road to Arkham, he wonders, fleetingly, if he should worry that Alfred is no longer questioning the logic and morals of letting Joker die. That he seems to have accepted that Bruce simply _can’t_ , and with it, the reasons why. 

And even as he does, Bruce knows the answer: no, he’s not worried. And he’s not going to be. Let Alfred, or anyone else for that matter, think what they will. 

Somewhere during the race to save Joker’s life, or maybe far earlier than that, he simply stopped caring. 

 

***

 

He knows it’s pointless to sweep through Joker’s cell again but he does anyway, because it’s better than doing nothing. Predictably, he doesn’t find any smuggled syringes or any other traces suggesting that Joker might have taken Luthor’s drug, but that still doesn’t mean that Joker _hadn’t_. 

Bruce isn’t sure that that’s what he’s looking for, anyway. It’s just something for his mind to latch onto while he absorbs the cell, with all the strong, lingering traces of Joker’s presence soaked into brick and mortar, as he lets his subconscious take over. If his rational brain can’t come up with any solutions…

There’s no one out in the corridors beyond; Bruce told them to stay away. The surveillance is off. There’s no one to see his weakness. 

Bruce sighs, and collapses onto the cot. He picks up Bruce the teddy bear and gazes into its blank, mismatched face. 

He’s still holding it in his lap when he looks around the cell, slowly, and lets himself listen to Joker’s voice, caught in writing on the walls. Years of it, some faded nearly to nothing, some stark and fresh and colorful, crayon and chalk and marker and, in some cases, scratches, and old dried blood the nurses haven’t been able to wash out. 

It sinks into him, the years and the madness and the violence. 

And the circles. Endless, their endings and beginnings blurred, eating their own tails in a self-destructive cycle with no hope of escape. 

Or is there.

Bruce’s breath turns meditative without any effort on his part, and as he does something in him suddenly knows that he’s ready to turn his gaze to the mirror. 

Joker is waiting for him there. 

“Well, would you look at that,” she says, because it _is_ she, this time, her hair dyed and cascading in wiry green strands over her face to her shoulders, her face painted and her makeup smudged, her mouth scarred the way Bruce saw it in the chemicals at Ace. She puts her hand on her hip, shifting her weight, and smirks at Bruce with something like warm indulgence. “You do have some messed up dreams, don’t you, darling?”

Bruce stares at her. Her torn-up face. Her green eyes. Her figure, and the way she holds herself.

He _knows_ her. He knows that he does. The feeling seems to drown out everything else, but he can’t place it, can’t make himself focus all of a sudden, and Joker’s smile stretches, testing the stitches around the scars at the corners of her mouth. 

“Poor baby,” she coos. “You look so miserable. If you only knew how entertaining it’s been.”

“Come back,” Bruce tries, and is as surprised at the sound coming out of his throat as Joker looks. 

Her face hardens. She’s not smiling anymore. “You can’t tell me what to do.”

“You’re dying!”

She looks stunned for a moment, but then she shrugs. “Aren’t we all?”

“Joker —”

“No. I’m not ready yet. I’ve seen so much, and there’s still so much more to do. I have to blow up this version of Gotham, for a start.” The smile returns, now, and it promises blood. “A world without you is no fun anyway.”

“Joker, please.”

She blows him a kiss, and waves. “See you around, Bruce.”

She laughs, then, and turns away. Only then does Bruce allow himself to blink, because he knows, instinctively, that there’s no use trying to hold it back anymore: she’s gone. 

It’s only when he does, and finds himself alone in the cell with Bruce the teddy bear in his lap, that he finally realizes.

He didn’t recognize his own mother. 

 

***

 

It’s much, much later — he doesn’t know how long — and he doesn’t even hear the signal the first few times it tries to poke through to his consciousness. He’s still sitting there, on Joker’s cot, the bear in his hands, and he’s squeezing the toy so hard his fingers meet and lace around its middle but even when he notices that he doesn’t let go.

“Bruce,” Alfred is saying, repeating, from a great distance. “Bruce. Master Bruce. Sir. Are you there?”

He’s crying, he thinks — he vaguely registers the salt of tears on his mouth, and can feel the tracks drying over his skin. He doesn’t know when he started, or when it ended — if it ended. Everything feels so far away. 

“Bruce, please,” Alfred is begging now. 

Alfred. He needs to focus on that, he thinks, and that thought too feels like it belongs to someone else. But he knows it’s right. He has to focus. He has to bring his own mind back into his body, he needs to _stop this_ , because, because — 

Joker. His mother. Joker. His mother, as Joker. And he _didn’t recognize her face until_ —

“Bruce!”

He blinks, and touches his cheek. “Alfred,” he manages.

“Oh thank god.” Alfred’s voice sounds breathy with relief. “I was beginning to think Dr. Arkham finally made good on his threat and locked you away. I have miss Kyle on the line. She wants to speak with you.”

“Miss Ky—” _Selina_. Bruce swallows. “Yes,” he tries, and has to clear his throat because the sound hardly resembles human voice. “Yes,” he repeats, more surely. The fog is beginning to lift. His mind is doing its best to sharpen, and compartmentalize that which will hold him back. Some of the urgency bleeds back into his limbs as he’s becoming conscious of the pulse of his own blood in his ears. “Put her through.”

“Very well.” Alfred sounds worried, but he doesn’t press the matter, and a moment later Selina’s quiet, smoky voice floods the cowl. 

“Batman.” 

_Not Bruce_ , he thinks. She’s not alone. 

Just as the thought strikes, Bruce decides that her voice doesn’t belong in this cell, and it feels wrong to invite it here. He gets up, his legs unsteady, and gently — his hands barely shaking at all — he replaces Bruce the teddy bear back on its pillow. 

He clears the cell. Supports his back against the wall in the empty corridor beyond, standing up. Only then does he say, “I’m here.”

“I’m in New York,” Selina tells him. “Eddie called and told us about Joker, that you’re investigating, and I don’t know how relevant it’ll be but… he was here.”

Bruce’s eyes narrow. “Here?” 

“Yes. Coney Island.” Selina pauses, as if hesitating, and then whispers, “At Harley’s. She doesn’t know I called you, but knowing you, you’ll want —”

Bruce’s body is tensing, locking into readiness. He turns away from the cell and doesn’t risk another glance at the mirror. 

“I’m on my way.”

 

***

 

“B-man.” Harley doesn’t look angry so much as resigned as she opens the window, as though she both expected Bruce’s visit and dreaded it. She sighs. “You might as well come in.”

“You’re _inviting_ him?” On the bed, Ivy is moving, getting to her feet and summoning vines to twine around her arms. “He’s gonna —”

“It’s okay, Red,” Harley tells her, smiling tightly, and then turns back to glare at Bruce. “B-man is only here to talk. Isn’t he?”

Bruce hesitates, looking between the two women: Harley in a pink tank-top and pajama pants with a bunny print on them, her head bowed and arms tucked around herself, and Ivy, resplendent in a long dress woven out of leaf and vine, tense and hostile and combat-ready. Officially, Harley is on parole, but if he could take advantage of the situation and bring at least Ivy in…

 _You don’t have the time_ , he remembers, thinking of the chill on Joker’s skin. _Selina invited you here trusting you won’t do anything stupid._

Besides, looking into Harley’s hard, defiant eyes, he knows that even if she doesn’t look dangerous, one wrong move on his part and she _will_ fight him, and even if he wins — which he isn’t sure he can, not with Ivy in the room — they won’t tell him anything.

Here and now, there is no question what is more important. 

“Yes,” he says. 

Harley nods, her narrowed eyes clearly communicating the violence waiting for him if he’s lying, and moves away from the window to give him space to leverage his weight inside. “Fine. Watch your step.” 

Bruce glances around to see animals sitting, trotting and lying about the room — cats and dogs and rabbits and birds — some on the floor, some on the bed, some on other assorted pieces of mismatched furniture. He decides it’s probably better not to ask. 

“This is a mistake,” Ivy is protesting. “He can’t be trusted. We should just kill him now.”

“Hey, now, gorgeous, at ease.” Harley walks up to her and puts both her hands on Ivy’s face, cupping it, then caressing her cheeks. “Shhh. It’s okay. I’ll handle it in like… three jiffies, and then I’ll come back up here so we can pick up where we left off, how about that?”

“I’m coming with you.”

“Nah, there’s no need, I can handle B-man.” Harley leaves a chaste but lingering kiss on Ivy’s mouth, and while it doesn’t exactly settle Ivy’s raised hackles, she does seem to deflate, finally dropping her arms so she can cover Harley’s hands with her own. “Besides,” Harley says, “he’s gonna want to talk about Mr. J. You know how worked up you get when I talk about him. I’d rather work you up in a whole other way, baby.”

“I still think this is a mistake.”

“I know. But I need to do this. Okay?”

Ivy hesitates, glaring at Bruce over Harley’s shoulder. Bruce suffers it in silence until she turns back to Harley, and takes her hands in hers to kiss them. 

“I’m going to kill Selina when she gets back.”

“Not if I get her first,” Harley promises. “Wait here for me?”

“Fine,” Ivy huffs, and moves to lounge on the bed, looking as beautiful as she is lethal. She reaches for a book and snaps it open, glaring daggers at Bruce over it. 

“Come along, B-man,” Harley sighs, all tenderness now dropping away to leave cold hostility. “Gotta have those deep heart to hearts in the kitchen, right? And I’m gonna need a _batallion_ of vodka for this.”

“That doesn’t even make sense,” Ivy throws after them as Harley starts leading Bruce out of the bedroom and down the steps. “Bottom left cupboard next to the fridge.”

“Thanks, babe!”

Bruce follows Harley down, his body and suit fitting awkwardly on the narrow staircase as he does his best not to step on any animals milling underfoot. He holds the edge of his cape up in his hand for good measure so none of them would take it into their furry heads to sit on it, play with it or worse. Harley giggles softly when she sees it, and before Bruce can protest she turns, whips out a phone from the pocket of her pajama pants and snaps a photo.

“For Mr. J,” she tells Bruce, her smile looking raw and unsure and self-deprecating, as if the sentiment is a weakness she expects him to judge her for. She shrugs, slipping the phone back in her pocket. “He’s gonna be sorry he missed that.”

She turns away before Bruce can say anything, and all but runs the rest of the way down. 

When Bruce successfully makes it down the staircase without tripping over or accidentally kicking a puppy, he finds her in a big, cluttered room that takes up all of the ground floor — a parlor, equipped with all sorts of entertainment from darts to video and board games to a pool table, with toys, blankets, pillows and other paraphernalia littering the floor and any other available surface; and an open kitchen, plunged into much of the same chaos but with more dirty dishes, displaced cutlery and crockery and garbage bags in need of taking out. Harley, heedless of the mess, is rummaging around noisily until she retrieves a bottle of vodka from the cupboard Ivy indicated. 

“Want some?” she offers, dangling it by the neck. 

“No.”

“I figured. You don’t seem like the type who’d drink on the job. Go on and find yourself a chair that’s the least stained, wontcha? Kitty and Ives helped me tidy up the other day but you wouldn’t _believe_ how hard it is to keep a house clean when it goes kablooey every other Tuesday.”

“The animals probably don’t help,” Bruce comments quietly. 

“Ha!” Harley appears to have located shot glasses amidst the clutter, and grabs one, then slams both the glass and the bottle on the counter in front of Bruce. “You don’t know the half of it. Or maybe you do. Kitty says you live in a real cave, with real bats, like some sort of Bat-cula. How do you stop them excrementing all over your car?”

“I have a butler.”

“Should get me one of those,” Harley decides, wistfully, hopping onto a stool across from Bruce. “I could get one of the hot ones and make him wear a teeny tiny thong. Does your butler have a thong?”

“No,” Bruce denies at once, the concept too terrifying to contemplate. 

“Pity. You should consider it. Or maybe a French maid outfit. Mr. J wore one once, for a heist.” Suddenly she makes a strangled, distressed noise, and tugs hard at her ponytails as though trying to hide her face behind them. “Shoulda known how things stood when he kept asking me if it made his butt look big, and then when he threw a fit when you didn’t show and didn’t see him in it. I mean… holy _duh_!”

She shakes her head, groans, and releases her hair only to grab the vodka, unscrew the cap and pour it into her shot glass until it flows over onto the counter. She throws it back in one go, and considers Bruce balefully as she slams the glass down.

“You really are one flat Stanley, arentcha? Anyone ever told you that?” 

“Joker did,” Bruce says, flatly. He resists the temptation to ask more questions about the maid outfit. The memory of his mother’s face painted white keeps him cold, and on track. “Harley,” he starts, “I need you to tell me as much as you know about what he was up to before I captured him.” 

“Kitty told you he was here, didn’t she?”

“That doesn’t matter. I know he was. What did he —”

“The nerve on that woman.” Harley downs another shot, and mumbles, “I shoulda known something fishy was up when she didn’t wanna stay in for karaoke night. Ha! Smart Kitty just wanted to haul that cute ass outta here cause she knew I’d have given it a right whooping soon as you showed up.” Harley considers it. “I still might.”

“Harley,” Bruce presses, because he recognizes it for the stalling tactic it is. 

She groans, and rubs up and down her face. She snaps, “Do you have any idea how dumb you look right now? Sitting in my kitchen like that? I have all sorts of weirdos here on the regular but lemme tell ya, you’re something else. Holy cognitive dissonance, Batman. I sure hope all the gear is _not_ overcompensation or Mr. J’s gonna be crushed. Though come to think of it, that would be _hilarious_.” She laughs, bitterly, and downs another shot.

“Harley.”

“What?!”

“He’s dying.”

All of a sudden, she looks small, and younger than she really is, sitting there chugging vodka in nothing but little girl pajamas and fluffy pink slippers, her face unpainted, remains of makeup smudged. Her eyes drop to the vodka stains on the counter as she hugs herself by the elbows, and her body droops, the fight leaving it as surely as though Bruce punched it out. 

She’s silent for a long time. 

And then, “Good riddance.” It’s quiet, though, and if anything, the words make Harley look even more miserable. Her eyes shine as she raises them to Bruce. “God, I don’t even mean that,” she whispers. “Why don’t I mean that? I should mean that. I should want him dead. But I don’t. What the hell is _wrong_ with me?”

Bruce considers how best to approach this, and then decides to simply press ahead because he understands the words, and the frustration behind them, only too well. And he knows himself well enough to understand that it only makes him resent her more for it, if only because she, at least, can express it out loud.

Which only means he’s not suited to handle what she’s going through. He’s only going to make it worse if he tries, and that same resentment means that he can’t even bring himself to start. 

So he doesn’t.

“Why was he here?” he asks, quietly. “I need you to tell me. Maybe then I’ll be able to help him.”

She doesn’t answer until she throws back another shot. She wipes her mouth on the back of her hand. She shrugs. 

“I guess,” she starts, hoarsely, “he wanted to make amends.”

Bruce’s heart squeezes, far too tight. “Like he did before?”

“No.” Harley is shaking her head, one ponytail slipping from her shoulder and down her back. “That’s the thing. I _thought_ it was like all the other times, but it wasn’t. He didn’t want anything from me, no money, no scams, no job or information, no nothing. I still wouldn’t let him in for ages, ‘cause I thought it was a big fat trick and I wasn’t gonna get suckered again. I only agreed to meet him over at the Boardwalk after he sat the whole night out on my stoop.”

“That…” Bruce hesitates. “That doesn’t sound like him.”

“You’re telling me.” Harley draws into herself even further. “It was _weird_. I had half a mind to shoot his head off even when I sat with him on that bench. He was eating cotton candy. He got some for me, too. I threw it on the ground and lemme tell ya, B-man, it felt damn good to do that. And I _love_ cotton candy.”

“What did he tell you?”

“Not all that much, considering.” Harley shrugs, and uncoils just enough to let the tip of her red-and-black-painted nail touch the rim of her shot glass. “I think he tried to apologize. But again, it wasn’t like any of the other times. Mostly ‘cause he was clumsy and awkward, which he normally never is when he doesn’t mean it. The biggest tip-off, though, was that this time around he didn’t try to tell me he loved me.” 

She sighs, and this time when her eyes flick to Bruce’s her mouth tugs into the beginnings of a bitter smile that reminds Bruce of Billy. “Was a relief, in a way,” she confides. “If he tried that again I really would have blown a hole right through him. Specially since I know the truth, now. I think I’ve always known. I just really, really wanted it not to _be_ the truth.” She pokes Bruce’s gauntleted arm with the tip of her nail, and her smile crooks. “You can relate, can’t you?”

Bruce doesn’t ask what that truth is. They both know, just as they know that she’s right. They are, after all, sitting together in this kitchen, the vodka bottle between them. That’s all the proof Harley needs. 

She nods after a moment, as if accepting Bruce’s silence for the meaning that it carries, and pours vodka into the shot glass again. 

Instead of throwing it back herself, though, she silently pushes the glass over to Bruce. 

Bruce looks at it, and then at Harley. The sad little half-smile has dropped away, leaving something far more brittle and wobbly in its stead, and she’s watching him, waiting. 

Testing him, and maybe herself, too. 

Bruce closes his fingers over the glass, then brings it to his mouth. He tips it up and swallows right through the burn. 

When he looks at her again, Harley is nodding, and they let the moment settle between them in silence that simmers with layers of understanding that doesn’t need any further words to make it real. She knows. And Bruce finds that he’s fine with it. 

If only here. If only now. 

“He’s fucked us both up, hasn’t he?” Harley whispers, accepting the glass from Bruce. “Then again,” she regards him, tilting her head to the side, “maybe he didn’t. Maybe we were fucked up from the get-go and he just helped bring it out. And then made it worse.” 

Bruce doesn’t comment on that. Once again he has the feeling that he doesn’t need to.

“Did he tell you anything else?”

“He said he was thinking some things over,” Harley tells him, turning contemplative. She’s no longer quite so hostile, quite so withdrawn, and the air in the kitchen warms up to accommodate this strange new solidarity forging between them. “Figuring things out, he said. He mentioned visiting some people, like Luthor and Billy Shiner, and old Weepy and Gaggy Gagsworth and some others. He called it the Greatest Hits Tour. Frankly, I was still too mad and shaken up to pay proper attention, but I do remember that one cause he looked pretty sad when he said it.” 

“Sad?”

“Yeah. Sad. And lonely, if you ask me. And that list of people he wanted to catch up with? It was short.” 

“Now, don’t get me wrong,” Harley picks up while Bruce digests this. “I’m not telling you that so you’ll pity him. If he’s lonely and doesn’t have anyone left to turn to, it’s his own damn fault. He _could_ have people around him if he wasn’t such a twisted, manipulative, self-sabotaging son of a bitch. He could have had me — as a friend, maybe. I think that’s kind of what he was after, even if he didn’t really realize it. At one point he said my nails looked nice and actually tried to get me to talk boys with him, if you can believe it. The nerve!”

“Was there anything else? Did he mention any other places he’d been to, or planned to visit? Did he mention any drugs?”

“Nothing about drugs, but I remember that besides the Greatest Hits list, he said he was trying out some tips from, and I quote, ‘a special magical friend from Europe.’” 

Well, fuck. “Did he specify who this friend was?”

“Nope. I only inferred it was a guy. He didn’t say anything more about him. Just that.” 

_Shit shit shit._ Bruce gets to his feet. 

“Then I’d better be going,” he says. 

“Yeah.” Harley looks at him with something like pity in her eyes. “Looks like you’ve got a whole continent to search. Sorry.”

“The Greatest Hits list,” Bruce says, “write it down. Give the list to Selina. I’ll want to follow up on that too.”

“All right. It had some guys from space on it though, like Lobo. Which probably doesn’t help.” 

Bruce sighs inwardly. He expected as much. “Doesn’t matter,” he says. For now, Europe does seem like the most solid lead he’s had since this whole thing started. He turns to leave. 

“Is he really dying?” Harley asks, and once again it strikes Bruce just how small she looks, and maybe a little scared, too, underneath all the years of hatred and hurt.

Bruce pauses, and then tells her, “Not if I can help it.”

“Okay,” she says. 

Bruce pauses in the door. 

“Harley.”

“Yeah?” 

“You’re a psychiatrist.” Bruce takes a deep breath. “In your opinion, when you saw him, did Joker seem like he might… do something drastic? Harm himself in any way?”

“You think he did whatever this is to himself?”

“It’s… an angle.”

_I think I'll go._

“Honestly? Yeah.” Harley’s drawing on the vodka bottle now, like she’s tempted to just down the whole thing and be done with it. “The Greatest Hits tour? Sounds a whole lot like closure, don't it. And like I said, he did act sad, and lonely, and kinda lost too. And tired. But even with all that, he didn’t seem suicidal. I don’t think it’s his style to do something like that premeditated. Maybe he did something stupid though, and it backfired. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“No,” Bruce agrees. “It wouldn’t.”

“Especially when _you’re_ involved.” Bruce looks at her, and Harley laughs, twisting a strand of hair in her fingers. “Honestly, B-man,” she huffs, “you don’t think that whatever this is, it’s aimed at you? You’re the reason he does anything. You have your own little family of bat-boys and girls and birds and supers, but J.? You’re _all_ he has.” She shrugs. “Like I said, he made sure of that when he pushed everyone else away. It’s always been you. Batman this, Batman that. Bat, Bat, Bat. It’s enough to make anyone sick.”

She slides off the stool, then, roughly. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.” She, picks up the bottle with one arm and uses the other to scoop a kitten from the floor, and kisses its head as if seeking comfort in the soft fur. It meows plaintively at her, and Harley lets it go. 

“I’m gonna go upstairs now to spend some quality time with my lady, and pretend this conversation never happened,” she says. “Don’t let me know how this ends. I’ll find out either way. Oh, and B-man?”

“Yes.”

She looks at him, once, over her shoulder, and Bruce thinks he sees something in her eyes soften. 

“Good luck,” she says, and turns away.

 

***

 

“Paris,” Alfred echoes, sounding stunned over the comm link. “Why on Earth are you going to Paris?”

“Harley Quinn said Joker visited someone in Europe,” Bruce tells him. “He’s got a cult in Paris.”

“I see.”

“It’s as good of a place to start as any.”

“And you’re en route as we speak, I gather?”

“Yes,” Bruce says, steering the Batwing over the Atlantic. 

Alfred sighs. “I’ll see if any of the family are available to babysit the city while you’re gone.”

“Thanks, Alfred. Has..." he hesitates, and then presses ahead. "Has there been any change?”

“Well… there has.” Alfred pauses.

Bruce’s blood rushes in his ears. He grips the controls so hard it hurts even through the gloves. “Tell me.”

“He slipped into a proper medical coma,” Alfred says. “The doctors are able to keep him stable this way for the time being. But the reports from the hospital are disquieting. It would appear that his body is… deteriorating.”

“How fast?”

“It’s difficult to tell. The process looks to be gradual. But the rate at which his muscles are atrophying does not correlate with how long he’s been under.” Alfred takes a moment, then, and tries, “Once again, Bruce, I must insists that you consider it might not be reversible. You have to —”

“No,” Bruce says. “I just have to be faster.”

He ends the connection, and triples his speed.

 

***

 

It takes him longer than it should to find his way into the Cirque’s underground cavern, but then again, he was half-incoherent from Bane’s virus the last time he was here so maybe that’s to be expected. It takes even longer to locate actual members of the cult and get them to talk, but eventually he learns that Joker did stop by in recent months for a night of rousing speeches and orgiastic revelry where he instructed them to “keep the faith” and “stand vigilant” and that he is “ascending to a higher plane of understanding and enlightenment,” and that they are free to worship him as they please. 

No one says anything about any people Joker might have held in higher confidence, or anything else useful for that matter. Even the woman who seems to be in charge of the group in Joker’s lengthy absences is too rapt with awe of him to question any of Joker’s lofty proclamations, or even — it seems — to hold conversations with him that would go beyond “Yes, Master.” 

Glorified henchmen, Bruce thinks, watching her, and as he does, disgust and disappointment fuel the helplessness that’s far too close to overwhelming him. Joker wouldn’t confide in any of them. It was foolish to expect he'd find anything here.

Still, at least now he knows that Joker _was_ here, and that he stopped over from — where? _Think_ , he tells himself, watching Paris flicker and tempt with her spattering of lights. _What do you know so far?_

He concentrates, standing atop the Notre-Dame, driven there by an impulse he’s too tired to question. The wind up here reminds him of Gotham, and so do the gargoyles, and reflexively, he looks at his right hand, imagining the old rope burn marring the black surface of the glove. The phantom ache flares up as if in memoriam. 

_You stepped on my line._

_I’m not going to apologize_.

_Some straight man you turned out to be._

A connection, and a missed chance, like so many others. Bruce’s hand curls into a fist, and he looks down at his feet, where recent rain left puddles to ripple on the wind. 

He isn’t surprised to see Joker’s face peering back at him.

“My, and where have we ended up this time?” he twitters, melodiously, and clucks his tongue at Bruce. “Do you like it?” He poses, twisting this way and that. “I think it’s rather fetching, don’t you?”

Bruce supposes, privately, that it is, even if it looks a little… much. This time around Joker’s hair is long and done up in a high top knot, his face is heavily painted, and he’s dressed in heavy, ornate, gilded robes that make him look like something out of a feudal Japanese scroll. To top off the effect he has a long mustache that he twirls in delight, and then he snaps twin battle fans at Bruce, laughing and giddy. 

“Maybe we should travel more,” he sings, still twirling so Bruce can admire him. “It does wonders to spice up the relationship. You should see yourself here, honey. So handsome in your new armor, and you’re having so much fun.”

“Come home,” Bruce pleads, quietly. 

“Not yet. I’ve barely scratched the surface. And who would’ve thought homoerotic rooftop fights with phallic-looking swords would be _such_ a turn on? I want to repeat this one again and again and again...” 

“Is this my fault?” Bruce asks. “Are you trying to teach me a lesson?”

Joker’s elated expression shutters away into something cold, and angry. 

“Well, I don’t know,” he snaps. “Do you think you need one?”

“Come home,” Bruce repeats. “Please.”

Joker regards him with narrowed eyes, and then sighs. “You think this is a dream, don’t you?” he whispers. “That this is somehow not real. I suppose I can give you this one hint, then: it is. It’s up to you what you do with it. Ta-ta.”

“Joker —”

The puddle ripples again, wrinkling and cutting through Joker’s face until it reflects the clouds above and little else. 

Bruce closes his eyes and leans heavily on cathedral stone. 

The other appearances, he thinks he might have justified somehow. A manifestation of his fears, longings, what-ifs. Nightmares. 

He can’t justify this. There’s nothing about Joker’s appearance this time that can be put down to something Bruce might have considered, feared or wished for before, consciously or not. 

It’s a hint. One that is too obvious, too glaring, to ignore anymore.

Circles, he thinks. Snakes eating their own tails. Cycles. Jars of soil, and drugs that can put one to sleep, and yoga tapes, and dreams and…

Mirrors.

Bruce stares at the puddle, and remembers every single time that Joker came to him when he was not asleep. He thought there wasn’t a connection between those appearances, and now he curses his own stupidity. 

Cycles, and breaking out of them. Meditation with white circles drawn on white hands pressed against rock. A drug that lets an overloaded brain quiet down, and the jars of soil from three important places. Seeking closure, connection, reasons to be loved. _A special magical friend from Europe._

 _Show me,_ , and _I could go anywhere._

_I think I’ll go._

Christ, he’d been an idiot. But no more. It's high time he actually listens to what Joker, and his own brain, have been trying to tell him from that first night in his bedroom.

Bruce makes the call right then and there, and swings down from the tower to launch himself through the city to the plane as fast as he can.

“Bruce?”

“Zatanna,” Bruce says, still running, and using the grapple to launch himself up the nearest building. “I need your help.”

“All right.” Zatanna sounds worried, but then says, “I’m in London. I can’t leave yet, but I’ll send you the coordinates. Meet me at the House of Mystery. John will grant you access.” 

“I’ll be there.”

Zatanna disconnects, and Bruce doubles his speed. He might not know who Joker’s magical friend is, but at least some of the pieces seem to be coming together, and as he starts the plane to launch it across the channel, he knows one thing beyond a shadow of doubt. 

He fucking hates magic.


	3. Chapter 3

They sit across from him at the dining table, and behind them, fire in the hearth majestic enough to rival Wayne Manor’s is crackling and throwing their long shadows over the panelled floor. Zatanna looks apologetic, flicking her long hair back over her shoulder.

“Sorry, but I couldn’t think of a safer place for us to meet,” she tells Bruce, “and _he_ comes with the territory. For now.”

Next to her, John Constantine shrugs, sprawling in his chair with one arm thrown nonchalantly over its back. The lit cigarette is dangling from his mouth, and he glances at Zatanna with an expression of mild annoyance. 

“Come off it, Zee,” he says. “The House of Mystery is mine and always will be. Deal with it. Now, let’s pretend to be good hosts, shall we?” He turns to Bruce. “Tea, Bats?”

Before Bruce can answer, he murmurs “ _Aet_ ” under his breath and three cups spark into existence on the table, with a complement of saucers, spoons, sugar cubes and milk, and a porcelain pot oozing steam. Constantine flicks the cigarette carelessly onto the rug, where it disappears, and helps himself to the pot, looking like he’d dearly prefer something far stronger. After a moment, Zatanna follows his lead and pours herself a cup, too. Bruce doesn’t move.

“I need to consult you on a case,” he says, looking at both of them. He nods at Constantine. “Maybe you can help, too.”

Constantine smirks. “Oh goodie, we get to play detective again.” Next to him, Zatanna is settling in, sipping the tea but looking attentively at Bruce. 

“It’s about the Joker,” Bruce starts, and doesn’t miss the way Constantine seems to stiffen at that, cup of tea arrested halfway to his mouth. Zatanna’s eyes narrow, and her mouth thins, her posture stiff and closing up.

Bruce expected this sort of reaction, and doesn’t let it deter him. He proceed to explain the way Joker seems to have slipped into a strange coma for no discernible reason, how they found him at Arkham, and about the circles on his hands. He is about to tell them about the jars and everything else too, but then —

“He’s done it,” Constantine whispers, and sets the cup down on the saucer with enough force to send half the tea spilling out. “Son of a bitch has gone and bloody done it!”

“What.” Bruce’s head snaps to him. “What do you mean?”

“Astral projection.” Constantine’s eyes are bright and wild, and he’s leaning forward, oblivious to the way both Bruce and Zatanna stare at him. “I can’t believe it. That crazy, crafty motherfucker.”

“But that’s impossible,” Zatanna protests. “It doesn’t sound like astral projection at all.”

“Well, that’s because it’s not, is it?” Constantine is jumping to his feet to pace the rug in front of the hearth, lighting another cigarette as he goes. “Astral projection is an oversimplification. He’s gone and sent his spirit into the bloody mirror dimension.”

“No,” Zatanna breathes. “No, he couldn’t have. He doesn’t have the skill or the knowledge. He shouldn’t even know it exists.”

Constantine stops the pacing for a moment, looking guilty, and avoids their eyes. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. "Well. Um." 

“John,” Zatanna snaps, glaring at him. “What have you done?”

“Nothing!” Constantine thrusts one hand in his pocket as he holds the cigarette in the other. “I didn’t _do_ anything! We were drunk, okay, and we got talking, and I may have let something about it slip out —”

_A magical friend from Europe._ Christ. Maybe it's a good thing Bruce can't quite move; if he could, he'd be hitting his head against the table.

“Since when,” Zatanna’s voice is glacial, “are you in the habit of getting drunk with the freaking Joker?”

“Since I saved him from a demon that one time,” Constantine says, looking at Bruce. “You remember, don’t you, Bats? You picked him up from London. I guess he liked me, cause he came over for a house call a few months ago.”

“John Constantine, you are officially the world’s dumbest, most pathetic —”

“What did you tell him,” Bruce cuts in. He’s also on his feet now, though he doesn’t even remember getting up.

“He got maudlin,” Constantine says, still looking at Bruce and ignoring Zatanna altogether. “So did I. We ended up trading what-ifs and… stuff. I kind of… Okay, yeah, I mentioned the theory of the mirror dimension, and parallel universes, and how in theory it might be possible to go see them. It was all hypothetical,” he adds defensively. “I had no idea he’d actually go ahead and _try_ it.”

“The mirror dimension,” Bruce repeats, quietly. 

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Zatanna repeats. “He’d need to have books. Perform a ritual. Prepare.”

“He did,” Bruce whispers. “I think.” 

“What else has he done?” Constantine demands. “Go on, Bats, tell us, we're gonna need all the details.” 

So Bruce does, and tells them about the jars of soil and Luthor’s drugs, and the crayons, and Nygma’s puzzles. He mentions the yoga tapes, too, and from the way Constantine looks at him, they’ve arrived at the same conclusions. 

“He was practicing,” Bruce says, nearly breathless with the way it all comes together. “The drug was so he could use it first to sleep, and then to quiet his mind enough to go into a meditative state. He took it at the Iceberg Lounge where he could rehearse in peace.”

“Yeah, and the soil was so he could use it as an anchor and conduit, and to determine which location would be the most powerful to help him use and channel the energy required to make the trip. He probably tried small at first to test it out, with each of the jars and that drug you mentioned.”

“And then he let me capture him and send him to Arkham,” Bruce finishes, “because he decided Arkham would be his best chance.”

“It would be, too. It’s haunted to hell and back, and he does seem to have a strong spiritual link to it.” Mercifully, Constantine doesn’t comment on the possible spiritual link Joker might have to Wayne Manor. “He probably used the yoga to help him practice in his cell, too, with the meditation, to see if he could do it without the drug.”

“And the circles…” Bruce starts. 

“The focus,” Constantine decides. “They represented what he felt, and what he needed to see. Where he needed to go. They represented —”

“Us,” Bruce finishes. “Me and him.”

“Yeah.” Constantine nods without looking at Bruce. “Yeah, that sounds about right.” 

“No, it doesn’t,” Zatanna protests. “If he wanted to perform some sort of ritual from Arkham, why bother robbing a bank first? Why not go straight up to the gates and let them lock him up?”

“He wasn’t sure he was going to do it,” Bruce whispers. “Right until he did it. The fight…” He closes his eyes, remembering it, remembering how lackluster it seemed, how quickly Joker gave up, how silent he was on the car ride to the Asylum. “He needed it for reassurance,” he concludes. “He wanted to face me one last time to see if he really needed… whatever the ritual would give him. He’d been working himself up to that decision for months.” _And he wasn't sure he would be coming back._

“And you said he was chanting in front of the mirror with his hands pressed to the wall?”

“Yes.” In the ensuing silence, Bruce takes out his tablet, and shows them the recording. 

They watch it in silence, heads bowed together. They look at one another, and doubt is starting to creep on Zatanna’s face. 

“What is he saying?” she asks.

“ _Show me_." 

“Zee,” Constantine whispers. Zatanna shakes her head. 

“Play it again.”

“Look here, see?” Constantine is pointing to the screen. “Hands on the walls. He’s communing with the building, asking it for help. That’s how he was able to do it in the first place.” 

“This isn’t magic,” Zatanna protests quietly. 

“No, or at least, not how we understand it. It’s something else. I asked him about it once, and he mentioned that it has to do with archetypes, and stories, and I think that’s a whole category of the supernatural that we don’t understand yet. Arkham _is_ his domain. I think that even if he wasn’t using magic, exactly, he was able to use the building to make some sort of connection with… I don’t know, something. A pathway, and he could open it up because of who he is, and where he was. It’s complicated. But the blackout supports it.”

“An energy discharge?”

“Yeah. The surge interrupted their electronics, and that’s when he managed to cross over for good.”

“I don’t know.” Zatanna is biting her lower lip, looking conflicted. “It still sounds far-fetched. Someone like the Joker shouldn’t be able to do that. The mirror dimension is accessible in theory, but it’s dangerous, and no one I know has actually been there.”

“There’s something else, too,” Bruce starts, and hesitates, not wanting to share what he still thinks are private moments. But Constantine is right — every detail is important. He needs to tell them. “He’s been… coming to me.”

“What? Like how?” Zatanna asks. 

“When I’m asleep. And. Sometimes when I’m awake, too. Usually in mirrors, but also in glass, liquids… reflective surfaces.” 

Zatanna gasps. She looks at Constantine. “Well, damn.”

“When does this usually happen?” Constantine demands. 

“In his cell at Arkham,” Bruce recounts, and tries not to shudder at that memory. “In the chemicals at Ace. In his room at the Iceberg Lounge. Just now, it happened in Paris.”

“Was it at a place that holds some sort of special significance to him?”

Bruce swallows. “Yes.” 

“Right. That makes sense. He’s used that spiritual connection as an anchor to reach out to you. In those places, the barrier would be thinner, easier to cross. And dreams are notorious for enabling magical projection even between dimensions.”

Bruce nods. He doesn’t tell them that in some of those visions, Joker looked as surprised to see Bruce as Bruce was to see him. 

Maybe it wasn’t just Joker's spirit seeking the connection.

“Well, the good news is that he should be back soon, if that’s the case,” Constantine says, passing the tablet back to Bruce. “Projection travels like that usually only last a week at the longest, or else the link between the mind and the body snaps and — Bats?”

Bruce's next breath doesn't seem to be coming. Cold sweat is beading down his back, and his mouth is open. 

Constantine’s eyes narrow. “Bats,” he asks quietly. “How long has he been out, exactly?”

Bruce only manages to form the words the second time around. “A month.”

There’s silence, punctuated by the crackling of the flames.

“Right.” Constantine seems to draw himself up. He turns to Zatanna. “We need to go to Gotham right now.”

“We still haven’t finished investigating the Scepter of Aghuillar,” Zatanna points out, but she, too, is tensing to readiness.

“The Joker has gone without a soul for a whole bloody month,” Constantine points out, sharply. “The Scepter can wait. Unless.” His eyes are wide, and his face looks pale as he turns to Bruce. “Unless he’s already dead?”

“No,” Bruce manages, “but he’s in a coma. He’s crashed once already. It’s… bad.”

“Yeah, we’re going _now_. You coming, Zee?”

“Yes.” Zatanna sighs. “You idiots need all the help you can get.” She glares at Bruce. “Why the hell didn’t you come to us sooner?”

Bruce doesn’t have an answer to that. 

He only prays they’re not too late.

 

***

 

“Bloody hell,” Constantine hisses when they enter Joker’s hospital room. He swallows loudly, and whispers, “Not gonna lie, Bats. This looks bad.”

Zatanna swears under her breath. Bruce approaches the bed in silence. 

Joker looks dead. There’s no other way to describe it. His face is grey and sunken, his muscles have lost what seems like half their already slight mass leaving his arms practically skeletal as they lay over the blanket, the bones far too prominent, the skin over his features and neck and chest stretched nearly to the point of breaking, and his hair is matted and greasy, clinging to his face. 

Bruce sits on the edge of the bed, because he feels that if he doesn’t, he might fall. 

Quietly, Zatanna comes closer to stand over Joker. With a glance at Bruce, she sweeps her hand over Joker’s body, murmuring spells, and then sighs and steps away. 

“His body is empty,” she says. “There’s no soul inside. The link to it is still there but it’s strained and worn to practically nothing. He won’t find the way back on his own, and if he doesn’t return soon, his body will decay utterly.”

“Think we can still bring him back?” Constantine asks. 

“I don’t know.” Zatanna’s voice is quiet. “Maybe. But I can’t promise that.”

“Right.” For a long moment, they’re silent, and then Constantine clears his throat. “Join me out in the corridor, Zee? We need to talk strategy.”

“Yeah, all right.” 

They leave, and as soon as Bruce hears the door close behind them, he takes Joker’s hand.

Carefully. The bones in Joker’s fingers and wrist look protruding and brittle, and like they might break at the first hint of pressure.

“I’m sorry,” Bruce whispers, eyes locked on Joker’s sleeping face. It blurs, just a bit. “I’m sorry, J.”

“It’s all right.”

Slowly, Bruce turns to the window. 

There’s a man there, barely visible where he’s caught between the lights of Gotham beyond and Bruce’s own reflection. He’s tall, and pale, with familiar pointy features, but his skin isn’t quite chalk white, and his hair isn’t green. It’s black instead, and combed neatly to the sides, and he’s wearing a white suit with a purple flower pinned to the lapel.

His smile is calm, and has a skittish quality to it. His eyes are a bright, toxic green.

He’s holding a gun in his hand.

“Hey,” he says, and his smile twitches a bit. “Wow, it really does look bad, doesn’t it? Yeesh. If that’s what I’m going to look like when I bite the dust do me a favor, darling, and cremate me. No one wants to see _that_.” 

“Tell me I’m not too late,” Bruce pleads, afraid to move except to hold Joker’s hand more tightly. 

“I wouldn’t know about that,” the man in the glass says. “But don’t worry. I’m quite happy here. I didn’t really want to go back.”

“Why would you do that?” Bruce demands. 

“Does it really matter?”

“Yes.”

The man studies him, and he looks serious now, the smile gone. 

“Maybe I got tired,” he whispers. “Maybe I needed something more. Maybe I wanted to see if there’s a world, somewhere, where the city would let us _have_ more. And you know what? There are. I’ve found them. And we _can_.”

“Then come back,” Bruce tries. “Come back and tell me about them. I want to,” he swallows. “I want to know.”

“Some other time,” the man tells him. “I’ve waited for you long enough. It’s your turn now. I’m gonna enjoy myself a little bit longer, I think.”

“Joker.”

“I’m late for my date,” the man says. He smiles. “See you in the funny papers.”

He puts the gun to his chin, and pulls the trigger.

The door opens in that same moment, and as Zatanna and Constantine get in, the glass once again reflects nothing but Bruce’s own cowled face superimposed over the city beyond. 

“We need to get him to his cell at Arkham,” Constantine is saying, and Bruce struggles to focus on his voice. “That’s the one place where the ritual will have the best chance of succeeding.”

“But you can’t move him,” Bruce protests, weakly. “If you disconnect him from the life support…”

“I’ll put him in stasis,” Zatanna tells him. “It’ll preserve him for a bit, buy us some time. Hopefully it'll be enough for you to bring his soul back.”

Bruce blinks. “Me?”

“Yeah.” Constantine puts a hand on Bruce’s shoulder. “Sorry, mate, but you’re the one with the strongest connection to him, and it seems that he’s maintained a link with you even as he lost one with his own body. You’re our best bet.”

Bruce digests this, and doesn’t know how to tell them that it’s no use. That it’s over, that they’re too late, because the man in the glass was no longer Joker, and because he pulled the trigger.

He looks at Joker’s body — the empty husk that isn’t really him anymore — and goes cold as he realizes that it’s started to wilt at twice the speed before their very eyes. 

"Shit,” Zatanna hisses. “Something’s happened — John, I think he’s tried to break away for good. We’re about to lose him. I’m doing the stasis spell now.” 

Bruce watches as she starts urgently muttering, and a web of light shimmers out of her hands and settles over Joker, seeping through the skin into his body. It starts to float, and his skin takes on a glassy sheen. When Bruce touches it, it feels like ice. 

“Yeah, we need to get a move on,” Constantine agrees, his face set and grim. “It’s now or never.”

“What do I do?” Bruce asks, and gets to his feet.

 _You haven’t lost him yet_ , he reminds himself. _Make sure that you don’t._

“We’ll put you under and perform a ritual to send your soul to the mirror dimension after his,” Zatanna explains. “Since he’s performed it in the cell once before, it should be easier to kickstart it and use the pathway he’s already opened. John will make sure you don’t get lost and I’ll keep Joker’s body preserved for as long as I can.”

“But you’ll need to hurry up,” Constantine warns him. “Zee won’t be able to hold the stasis spell forever. You’ll have an hour, tops.” He looks at Joker’s body, and winces. “Maybe even less than that.”

“He’s ready,” Zatanna says. “I’m going to transport us to Arkham now.”

Heart sore and heavy, Bruce nods. He reaches out to grab Joker’s hand again, and neither Zatanna nor Constantine say anything about that. 

Then Zatanna says the words, and they all disappear. 

 

***

 

“Ugh,” Zatanna murmurs some minutes later, shuddering in the middle of Joker’s cell. “I _hate_ coming anywhere near Arkham. All my hair is standing on end.”

“That refreshing aroma of murder, blood and madness, eh?” Constantine smirks at her. Then he looks down to the floor, where Bruce and Joker’s body lie side by side in the middle of identical ritual circles that he drew there in white chalk.

Constantine nudges Bruce’s shoulder with his shoe. “Okay there, mate?”

“Get on with it.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Constantine kneels on the floor between them, and orders, “Hand up, glove off.”

He then uses the remains of Joker’s white crayon to draw a circle on Bruce’s palm. He does the same with Joker’s hand, and clasps them together.

“Hold it,” he tells Bruce. “I’m gonna bind your hands together now so you don’t let go of him when you go under. It’s important. It should guide you to him, and then lead you both back. At least,” he grins, “that’s the theory. Neither of us has ever done anything like that before. Still think you’re up for it?”

“Yes,” Bruce says without hesitation. “I’m ready.”

“Before we actually do this,” Zatanna chips in, “I feel like I should be the voice of reason and point out that we’re kind of going against common sense here. We’re trying to save the soul of one of the worst supervillains out there, and he might not even want to be saved.” 

“Noted,” Constantine murmurs. With a word, he creates a golden thread that weaves around Bruce and Joker’s joint hands, pressing them tight together. 

“Just thought someone should say that,” Zatanna claims. “You know, in case it wasn’t obvious. Not that it’s gonna change anything, is it?”

“No,” Bruce says.

“Right. So long as everyone’s on the same page.” She sighs. “John, you should probably start now. I can feel his body fighting me.”

“Right-o!” Constantine claps his hands together, and stands up. “Remember, Bats, your job is to find him and bring him back. Don’t dawdle, don’t make any pit stops, don’t let him derail you. You’re on the clock. Oh, and just a heads-up, we don’t know that for sure but you probably won’t remember anything you see and hear in there when you wake up. All clear?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” Constantine extends his hand over Bruce. “ _Ssalg gnikool eht hguorht..._ ”

Bruce squeezes Joker’s frigid hand in his and closes his eyes.

 

***

 

When he opens them again, he’s alone, and everything is black.

“Joker?” he tries, and the sound bounces off of nothing, and dies as it’s sucked into the emptiness.

Bruce’s first thought is, _It didn’t work_.

But then he hears something — not a sound, exactly, but an echo of one, rippling and interrupted as if by static. 

Laughter.

Bruce listens in, his eyes closed — not that it makes a difference, with the darkness so deep and complete all around him — and after a moment, determines that it seems to be coming from his left. 

He turns, and starts walking, and as he does, his right hand begins to tingle with the impression of ice.

For some time, that’s all that happens. Bruce sees nothing, and hears nothing but the torn-up scraps of sound. His own footsteps make no sound and he appears to be walking over nothing at all, and he can’t even hear his own heartbeat. It’s like he’s all at once been rendered deaf and blind, and the tinkling echoes are the only thing that gives him any direction. 

And then, suddenly, there is light. 

It starts with a flicker, small and faint and gone in the next blink. But as Bruce takes another step, he sees it again, and it’s bigger this time, the light just a bit stronger. 

Bruce walks towards it, and the flicker blinks in and out, growing bigger and stronger with every step. Then there’s another one, and another, with more sparks beginning to shoot off further away, marking out a path through the darkness, filling the void with their gentle, winking glow.

 _Windows_ , Bruce realizes as he gets close enough for some of them to gain substance.

They’re rectangles, he decides, and they settle one by one, around and over and under him as he walks. There’s movement in them, and color. Bruce can’t tell yet, but he knows, instinctively, that he’s on the right track, and if he only gets a _little_ closer…

Then he’s by the first one, and he stops, and watches. 

It’s himself, chasing Joker. Except his suit looks cheap and flimsy, like the kind of costume one could buy in a Halloween store, and this Joker looks older, with a laughing, almost kindly face that looks warm and joyful as he chuckles and taunts his Batman. 

Bruce thinks they’re in Gotham, but it feels wrong. This city is _sunny_ , and it’s broad daylight, and everything looks far too bright and clean and vivid. Dick is by this Batman’s side, almost equal in height, and his costume looks just as cartoonish as Batman’s. He’s saying something, and his Batman appears to correct him in a gentle, patient, _fatherly_ tone that Bruce thinks he was never able to manage. 

He watches, mesmerized, as the chase unfolds, and turns wacky and whimsical, and wonders at himself looking _happy._

Then the laughter peals in his ear again, somewhat closer. Bruce blinks and looks in its direction, down the path of windows. There’s more of them now, far more — they seem to stretch out without end before him, all bright with promise. 

He gives the whimsical, bright, playful Gotham a wistful look, and moves on.

The next one is just under his feet, and as he gazes down into it, he sees himself and Joker, looking like drawn cartoons. Their lines and edges are sharp, and they appear to be up in the Watchtower along with other people, and Joker is in a blouse and pencil skirt and heels for some reason, looking delighted at Batman’s arrival. 

Then the next window shows him a man who he thinks will be Joker, but isn’t yet, wearing a brown suit and shooting up a ballroom full of people in a pointy red carnival mask. Bruce finds himself there in the crowd, protecting a woman, and then throwing two batarangs after the escaping Joker. 

He watches as they catch Joker on either side of his mouth, scarring it, before he manages to escape. 

Then he’s passing two windows at once, one on his left and one just above. That one shows him Joker with his hair neatly trimmed and combed, dressed casually in skinny white jeans, a pink t-shirt and a lose sports jacket, bleeding from a bullet graze on his neck as Bruce holds him in his arms. 

Bruce is so intent on that one that he almost misses the one to his left, where the Red Hood, in his old helmet and cape, appears to be fighting side by side with Batman against what looks like a version of Owlman. 

Further along he recognizes the Jokester, and then startles at another female Joker — this one stunningly beautiful and perfectly put together, singing in a smoke-filled pub in a long green dress that’s cut to offer an enticing view of her long leg. She looks nothing like Bruce’s mother this time, and he watches her for a longer moment before he moves on. 

There’s more windows around him now — so many he finds it difficult to keep track of them. He cranes his neck this way and that, down and up and right and left, trying to see and absorb as much as he can. And what he sees chills him, or steals his breath away, or both. 

He thinks he understands why Joker would want to stay here. 

He keeps walking, and passes image after image, each one painful and heartbreaking in its own way, and some of them plain horrifying. 

Like a sad, lonely Joker sitting on a bench on a pier in faded, tattered clothes, a hood over his head, looking out over the river as he waits for a Batman that disappeared. 

Or himself in black leather looking like a creature of nightmares, his head crowned in spikes, his face half-covered to reveal white skin and Joker’s own smile on his face, fighting both Joker and yet another, more recognizable version of himself in a cave, the both of them moving as one and trusting one another without a word. 

He sees a monster made of metal that has both his own face and Joker’s on the other side, a hybrid that seems to mock him with truths he’s well past denying. 

He sees himself and Joker sat on chairs side by side with their hands tied behind their backs, looking old and battered, and watches as this Batman and this Joker look at one another one last time before the bullets of a firing squad rip their bodies to shreds. 

He sees himself and Joker, kneeling side by side in a church, sharing a quiet _Amen_.

And he sees the two of them together in the rain holding one another and laughing while police car lights catch them in their twin beams. 

He makes himself walk on, follow the sound that’s growing louder, but still he can’t help peering into every new window he sees. He sees more cartoons and laughter and innocent fun. He sees the two of them as normal people fighting out their conflict on much a smaller scale, and he also sees them as pirates, vampires, magicians, 19th century detectives and criminals, knights and court jesters, as robots and samurai and beasts and demons and gods, and even computer programs. He sees more violence. More blood, and death, too. His, or more often Joker’s, or worse, one of them growing old without the other until they can’t handle it anymore. 

He seems them dying together, and those glimpses are comforting. 

But he also sees passion, and the first time he witnesses himself and Joker locked together and moving rhythmically — sharp, brutal thrusts and breathless moans and eyes clouded with pleasure on the coarse concrete of a rooftop — he has to stop, and stare, and swallow, and he’s unable to tear his eyes away for far too long. 

_You don’t have time for this_ , he tries to remember as his eyes drink in every detail of the image before him, every gasp of pleasure, every smallest movement. _You need to move on_. 

And he does, eventually, but more windows await him that contain similar scenes, some violent and bloody and some slow and tender and loving, and then he starts seeing weddings, too, symbolic and literal. Happiness, however brief, however bittersweet. A future together, one way or another. Stolen, private moments in secret, or the Manor full of laughter and warm domestic chaos as Joker comes to Bruce complaining about how Tim beat him in a video game again. 

The two of them, growing old together, and at last unafraid to love. 

He could lose himself here. It would be easy. He could spend an eternity wandering this maze, waste away whole lifetimes gazing into each window in turn, and yearning, and wondering which of these he could make real in his own reality had he made different choices along the way. 

And a part of him wants to. A part of him thinks maybe Joker had the right idea, and that maybe he’s tired of eating his own tail, too. 

How is he supposed to find his Joker in this maze, anyway? It seems impossible. Joker could be in any of these. Maybe Bruce should touch the surface of one of the windows — the mirrors — and try to cross over, to check if Joker isn’t there. How else should he be able to tell, and to call him back? It seems necessary. If he just tries it, once…

The laughter breaks out again, almost right in his ear. Reluctantly, Bruce steps away from the closest mirror, in which he and Joker are fighting together against a common enemy, only this time they’re both wearing matching wedding bands on their fingers. 

He’s close. 

Following the laughter is perhaps the hardest thing he has ever had to do, but he does it, willing himself to take every single step, and he tries not to look into the mirrors any more as he passes them. He knows that if he lingers on them again, he’ll be lost. 

And then he hears it, in startling clarity, and stops. 

“I don’t know, darling,” a familiar, quiet voice is saying. “Alfred doesn’t seem to like me. Maybe it’s best if you go alone.”

Bruce turns right. He sees the man from the hospital window, adjusting his tie before a dresser with something that looks like Bruce’s downtown penthouse behind him. He looks into the man’s eyes, and he knows. 

_It’s him._

Joker seems to be staring right at Bruce without seeing him, and the fingers on the tie are nervous, dancing over the fabric to tug it this way and that. He’s looking into the mirror, Bruce realizes, and seeing nothing but his own reflection. 

Just as he wonders how he could reach through to him, he sees a pair of hands land on Joker’s shoulders, rubbing circles into his muscles through the fabric of the white dinner jacket. 

“Don’t worry about Alfred,” Bruce’s own voice is saying, warm and fond in a way that makes Bruce’s heart hurt. “He’ll come around.”

“We’ve been dating for half a year.”

“Then it’s all the more reason to show him he has to get used to having you around,” the mirror-Bruce insists. “And he doesn’t _hate_ you. He’s suspicious of everyone.”

“I’m just saying,” mirror-Joker insists, covering one of Bruce’s hands with his own. “It’s his birthday. I don’t want to make things awkward.”

“You won’t be making anything awkward.”

“Have you _met_ me?”

“Yes,” mirror-Bruce is saying, bending over to kiss Joker’s cheek, “and I’m very glad I did.”

He’s got a beard, thick and black, that makes him look rugged but that somehow fits. Bruce finds himself touching his own smooth chin, and then smiles when in the mirror, Joker blushes and breaks into that uncertain, wobbly smile Bruce remembers from the hospital. 

“Well, okay,” mirror-Joker capitulates, “as long as you’re sure. Does my tie look all right?”

“It does to me,” mirror-Bruce shrugs, “but don’t be surprised if Alfred tries to adjust it for you anyway. He still does that to me. Actually, if he does, it’ll mean you’re officially part of the family.”

Joker hums, looking thoughtful. “Maybe I should leave it askew on purpose then.”

“He’ll see through that.” Mirror-Bruce bends over him again, and gently steers Joker to face away from the mirror. “Listen, don’t worry. Just safeword when you start getting anxious and we’ll come back here. Or I’ll have someone drive you to your place if you’d rather be alone. It’ll be fine.” 

“All right,” Joker sighs, though he still looks uncertain, even after mirror-Bruce presses a soft, lingering kiss to his mouth. 

He turns to the dresser, then, and picks up what looks like powder. Mirror-Bruce disappears into the bathroom. Joker focuses on what is presumably his own image in the mirror. 

“Joker,” Bruce tries, and knows immediately that Joker sees him. 

“Oh,” he says, blinking, and sitting up straight. The uncertain expression hardens into something cold. “Hello. You actually came.”

“You didn’t think I would?”

“I wasn’t sure.” Joker’s voice sounds dry. “I don’t know if I wanted you to.”

“Well, I did.” Bruce takes a deep breath. “I’ve come to take you home.”

“So I figured.” Joker adjusts his tie one more time. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

“This isn’t real, Joker. You can’t keep stealing lives like this forever.”

“Au contraire, my love. I’ve been doing splendidly so far.” 

“You’ll get bored.” 

“Then I’ll get back.”

“You won’t be able to. If you don’t come back with me now, you’ll die.”

“And if I do, then what?” Joker snaps. “We’ll just return to the same old grind. No thank you, dear. I love you, and I love what we had, but I’ve tasted variety now and I’d rather keep exploring what else we might have besides that. You’ve seen it.” He smiles. “I doubt I’ll run out of places to visit.” 

“You’d leave me,” Bruce manages. 

“Not if you stay here with me,” Joker whispers. His green eyes gleam. “I could call the other you here into the room, right now. I could ask him to touch the mirror, and then you could zap right in. I’ll show you what to do. We could jump across all those fun new worlds together, darling, and never run out of new ways of being together.”

 _Yes_ , a part of Bruce is crying out. _Yes, please, do it now._

He’s shaking his head before it can find voice. “It wouldn’t be real.”

“So what? It feels real enough when you’re on the other side. I’ve felt you just fine, baby.” Joker’s eyelids drop, and he licks his lips. “In so many different ways.”

“It wouldn’t be right,” Bruce argues, thinking, _Could_ he? Could he let his spirit lose itself here, with Joker, leaving behind all of Gotham, his home, his family, as his body is left to rot beside Joker's on the Arkham floor? 

“Wouldn’t it feel good,” Joker is saying, as if reading Bruce’s mind, “to let loose? Let others worry about Gotham. You’ve done your share. Would you seriously rather toil away night after night for nothing until you die than stay here, enjoying everything we could be?” 

“I’ve got people back home who need me.”

“Well, good for you,” Joker snaps, dropping the tempting demeanor. “I don’t. There’s nothing for me back there except more of the same.”

“It doesn’t have to be true.”

“Doesn’t it? You think anything will change? We won’t remember anything of what he saw here, baby. We’ll forget, and everything will go back to the way it was. I don’t want to forget.”

“I won’t,” Bruce tells him. “I may forget what I saw, but I won’t forget what you did, and all the times you came to me. I’ll know _something_ happened here and I’ll remember the lesson.”

“And what lesson would that be?”

“That there could be more,” Bruce whispers, “and that nothing good comes out of being a coward.”

Joker’s eyes narrow. He laces his hands together and peers at Bruce with his chin supported on them. “Learning the lesson is one thing,” he says, “applying it, quite another. Do you honestly believe this will change anything?”

“I don’t know,” Bruce says, truthfully. “I can’t promise you that. But we can’t find out if you don’t come home, and,” he takes a deep breath, holding Joker’s eyes, “I think you’re as much of a coward as I am.”

Joker’s mouth plunges down. “Not loving this pitch so far, baby.”

“You are,” Bruce insists. “You’re just as afraid of things changing as I am. Maybe more. That’s why you ran away here, where you can jump in and out the moment it gets uncomfortable. You wouldn’t be able to do that back home. You’d be stuck with your choices. Our choices.”

“Is that supposed to scare me?” 

“I think it does.” Bruce holds his eyes. “If things change back home, Joker, they change for good. And you’re not sure you can handle that, which is why you’re hiding out here, stealing other men’s lives.”

“I’m not _hiding_.”

“Then prove it. Touch the mirror. Come home with me, and let’s see how much of what we’ve seen here _can_ be real, and how much is smoke and mirrors.”

“And why would I?” Joker demands. “You’ve seen what I’ve had here. What I will keep having if I stay. Who’s to say our world is any more real than this? Why on Chaplin’s little Hitler mustache would I go back with you, when I don’t even care if it’s real or not? When I’m _happy_?”

“Because I can’t stay with you,” Bruce whispers, “and I need you. And I think,” he adds, “that you do care if it’s real or not, deep down. You stay here any longer and you’ll go mad.”

“A bit late for that, don’t you think?”

“Not mad, then,” Bruce amends, “but lost. You’ll forget what is _supposed_ to be real. And soon enough you’ll lose yourself in one of those places completely, and you might be happy for a while but you won’t ever be able to get rid of that bit of uncertainty that it’s not actually happening, and that you don’t belong there.”

Joker is silent, watching Bruce through the mirror. 

“And I suppose you’ll say I belong with you,” he muses. 

“You do,” Bruce agrees. “You saw the mirrors. There’s a Joker and a Batman in every version of Gotham. If you stay, you’ll be leaving things unbalanced. The story will be incomplete.”

“I don’t care about that.”

“Yes you do. You can read Gotham better than anyone. Better than me,” Bruce admits with some difficulty. “It’ll leave a hole in our story, and you won’t ever be able to see how it’s supposed to end.” 

Joker sighs, and rubs his eyes. 

“I don’t want to forget,” he whispers, and his voice sounds small. 

Bruce hesitates. 

“I can’t promise you that things will be better,” he tries, slowly. “I can’t say that the changes will happen, or that they’ll be good. But I think they will. I will remember enough to make it so. And I could, maybe… give you _something._ In time. Something that will make it worth going back for.”

Joker laughs, bitterly, wetly. His eyes glisten as he raises them to Bruce. “Sure you wouldn’t rather stay here with me and play hookie?”

“I can’t,” Bruce says, and the regret and heartbreak in his voice are genuine. 

“No,” Joker agrees quietly, “I suppose you don’t. I wouldn’t love you otherwise.”

“Come home with me,” Bruce pleads again. “Let me show you our ending - the real one. It’s not too late.” He hopes.

“I really hate you sometimes, you know that?” Joker rubs his eyes again, and his hands come away wet. 

“I know.” Bruce smiles. He reaches out to touch the surface separating them. “Please. Let me prove myself to you.”

Joker glares at him, and he looks tired, and defeated, and like he might change his mind again and keep arguing, or maybe stand and leave the mirror and Bruce behind. 

But then, suddenly — violently — he all but punches the mirror as he connects his fingers with Bruce’s through the glass.

All at once, there’s a flash of light, and Bruce closes his eyes, momentarily blinded. 

He feels Joker’s body clinging to his own before he can open them, and then he does, and smiles when he sees the same green eyes, but white skin and green hair and the Arkham jumpsuit instead of the man from the mirror, who, behind Joker, is blinking as if dazed.

It’s his Joker Bruce holds in his arms now, but not the wilting corpse he left behind. Instead it’s the man who sat on Bruce’s bed in the moonlight so many nights ago. Tears are streaking his cheeks and flowing freely as though Joker doesn’t feel them on his own face, and he tries to smile at Bruce. 

“It’s just as well, I suppose,” he says, wetly, brokenly, craning his neck to see the mirror version of himself shudder and hug himself, and stand up to head for the bathroom. “Some of those normie versions of me are so milquetoast it’s embarrassing. I stayed with this one because you look magnificent with a beard.” He looks at Bruce, and wags a threatening finger at him. It’s trembling, just as Joker’s voice is, and they both pretend that it’s not. “If you think he’s cuter than me, I’m going back in there.”

Bruce catches his face in both hands. “He's not,” he whispers, and kisses him. 

It's a short kiss, and Joker seems too stunned to react much, but that doesn't matter. Bruce tries not to wonder how many kisses Joker has already stolen, because that doesn't matter, either.

It's his first. _Their_ first, in all the ways that count. And if they do forget it when they wake up?

That only means they'll get to have their first kiss again, and Bruce thinks, _Well, at least I know I_ can _, now._

It's a first step, anyhow. A change. And a promise - one that, this time, he intends to keep.

“Let me take you home?” Bruce asks into Joker’s parted lips. 

“Wait.” Joker is grasping at his cape now, keeping Bruce close. “Do that again. One last time, okay?” He smiles. “I got quite used to you kissing me. You need to wean me off gently or the culture shock is gonna kill me.”

“That would be a shame, after all the trouble I went to,” Bruce agrees, and kisses him again.

He makes it slow, and lingering and deep, and Joker lets him, moving his mouth against Bruce’s with tenderness that tastes of tears. They kiss and hold on among the darkness and the myriad mirrors reflecting different versions of them over and over and over, always together, always in each other’s orbit, always destined to define one another in a million different ways. 

There’s reassurance in that, Bruce thinks, and it’s the last thought he has before something violently tugs at his middle. 

_Batman!_

He blinks, and breaks away from the kiss, listening. 

_Batman, you need to get back now_ , the voice is yelling somewhere in the far off distance. It sounds like John Constantine, and like he’s been yelling for a while now. _Zee won’t be able to keep the spell up much longer. He’s crashing._

Batman looks at Joker’s face, caught in both his hands, and moves to grab his hand instead. 

“Come on,” he says. “We need to go.”

Then he feels the pull on his middle again, and this time, he lets it carry him on.

They fly over the labyrinth of mirrors, guided by something invisible but sure, so fast that the moving images around them blur into a riot of color. Joker’s hand in his grip goes slack, but Bruce holds on, even as he glances over his shoulder and realizes he’s not holding _his_ Joker anymore. 

He’s holding the black-haired Joker, and then the Red Hood. Then a new one, with long hair and red eyes and bare feet. Then the one he remembers from Ace. Then a Joker in a handyman’s outfit, with the skin of his face cut off and worn as a crude parody of a mask, showing grisly bare meat underneath. Then, a Joker with a fist-shaped hole in the middle of his chest. Then a frightened little boy with mousy blond hair and a broken jaw. Then a teenager in a long green coat, his hair jet-black like Bruce’s. Then another female Joker, and then one without a shirt on with tattoos all over his body and face, and then another, and another, and another, flickering by faster than Bruce’s brain can process them, and he almost lets go a few times, horrified by what he sees. 

But he doesn’t. He holds on fast and breathes out when they finally leave the light of the mirrors, and Joker blinks back to his regular self, and shakes his head as if to clear it, blinking dazedly at Bruce. 

Then the pull on Bruce’s body guides him up, and light comes on ahead. 

_Nearly there!_

“No,” Joker whispers. And then, “No!”

Bruce keeps his grip on his hand tight as Joker begins to fight him, struggling to break free, pulling and kicking and trying bite through Bruce’s glove. “No,” he’s shouting, “I don’t want to go back. Let me go! Let me go, I’m staying here, I want to!”

“Come on,” Bruce prays, holding onto him as hard as he can. The light is getting closer, and the voices around him get sharper with every nanosecond. “Come on.”

“No, you can’t make me!”

_We’re losing him!_

Bruce feels Joker’s hand slipping free, and cries out just as light explodes all around them.

He blinks, and his eyes open. He’s lying on his back on the unforgiving floor of the cell, and John Constantine is peering down at him, looking like he hasn’t slept in a week.

“Hey there, mate. Welcome back.” He hovers the two-fingered salute in front of Bruce’s face. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

Bruce draws in a greedy breath and swats his hand away. He pulls himself to his side. 

“Joker,” he whispers. 

Their hands are still linked, and he vaguely registers Zatanna, standing over Joker and slowly dropping her hands. Joker’s eyes are closed, and he looks frail and small in his hospital gown, skeleton-thin and ashen grey. 

For a moment, there’s silence as everyone in the cell focuses on the still body lying on the floor.

 _Please_ , Bruce prays silently. _Please._

And then Joker’s chest moves, and his mouth opens to take in the stale air from the cell, and some color seems to creep back into his features. 

“Come on, Zee,” Constantine is saying, somewhere above them, “let’s see if there’s any decent coffee in this place.” 

They leave, then, or so Bruce thinks later on. Right now, he isn’t listening. 

He’s crawling across the floor, pulling himself up, and cradling Joker’s shivering body in his arms. 

 

***

 

Joker finally opens his eyes twenty four hours later, and Bruce is there when he does, sitting on the edge of his hospital bed. 

He smiles and glances at the clock. It’s showing 3:33 in the morning.

“Welcome back,” he says softly, watching as Joker’s eyes struggle to stay open and focus on him.

It takes a while. Bruce is patient. He lets Joker open and close his mouth a few times, testing his recovering muscles and vocal cords before he gets them to work. 

“Did I,” Joker tries, and the sound comes out hoarse and slurred. “Did I do it?”

“Yes. Do you remember anything?”

Joker tries to speak again, and then attempts to shake his head instead. The movement is stiff and miniscule, but it’s enough, and so is the quiet despair in his eyes. 

Bruce whispers, “Me neither.” 

Which isn’t quite true. He remembers everything right up until the moment when he lay in Joker’s cell with Constantine beginning to chant a spell over him. 

He tried to remember more, but every time he did, he could only summon up a tangled mass of color and noise and feeling, and it left him with an ache so deep and profound he still feels it there in his heart hours later. He knows exactly what it is. 

Loss.

Something happened back there. Something important. They had it, and then they lost it, and Bruce knows he won’t ever be able to remember what it was and also that the ache of it will always be with him, now, like the knowledge that whatever they lost, they did so by choice. 

Joker’s glistening eyes tell him that he’s experiencing that same ache, and for now, that is enough. They both need time to work through it, process what happened and the reasons why it did. 

And Joker’s body needs to recover. It’s looking far better already, his skin back to its usual color, but he’s still far too thin and weak and it will take a while before he builds enough muscle back to even walk without aid. 

Bruce will tell him about the rest, in time. 

When they’re ready.

“And this,” Joker is trying to say, struggling, “this is… real?”

“Yes,” Bruce says. “You’re home.”

“You…?”

“I came for you,” Bruce confirms. “I think I brought you back. But I don’t remember. Maybe it was you.”

Joker is closing his eyes, and attempting to shake his head again. Tears are beginning to drip down his cheeks. He can feel it, Bruce thinks. Somehow. The loss, and also the fact that the choice wasn’t his.

Bruce wonders if he should leave. It feels like the right thing to do. Let Joker rest, and deal with the aftermath on his own terms. 

He starts to move, and then stops when Joker’s bright eyes open and pin him down. 

“Bats,” he manages, and his voice is already beginning to sound stronger. 

Bruce sits back down. “Yes.”

“You…” Joker pauses, and takes a breath. “You came for me.”

Bruce feels himself go soft, and wonders if it shows on his face. “Yes,” he whispers. 

Joker’s mouth twitches, and then turns up, just a little. Just enough. “Good,” he rasps. 

Bruce considers him. “This was a test, wasn’t it?”

“Maybe.”

“And now? What will you do?”

“I think…” Joker pauses, and glances to the side at the city beyond. Then his eyes lock on Bruce’s again, and he sighs, and seems to settle against the pillow.

He whispers, “I think I’ll stay.”

His fingers twitch, too weak yet to move.

Bruce smiles.

And lets his own hand touch Joker’s instead.


End file.
